Cartagena, Colombia where hope trumps despair

Franklin W Knight

THE port city of Cartagena on the rugged Caribbean coast of Colombia has more lives than a proverbial cat. It is a wonderfully fascinating place where hope has repeatedly trumped despair. In this charmingly historic city the people have repeatedly manifested a strong resilience as well as a determined political will not only to survive but also to succeed. Cartagena has had the sort of up-and-down history that ought to resonate strongly wherever violence and inept government seem to be the order of the day. Cartagena may stay knocked down for a long time. But it never stays down forever; and it never gives up. A sound moral emerges from the challenging experience of the people of Cartagena. It is that nothing lasts forever.

Reconstructed 11-km Cartagena city wall invincible in the 18th century. (Photo: Franklin W Knight)

Cartagena was founded in 1553 during the Spanish expansion in their desperate search for gold and other precious commercial commodities. A civil war was still raging among the conquistadores in upper Peru. With an excellent sheltered harbour and abundant supplies of fresh water from the nearby Magdalena River, the location proved irresistibly attractive. So Pedro de Heredia started a modest settlement that grew in fits and starts. When the wars ended Cartagena became an important nodal point along the route that linked the wealth of Peru to Havana and Spain. From Peru and the interior of Colombia came copious quantities of silver and gold for trans-shipment to Spain. In the other direction flowed African slaves to do the multiple manual tasks required in colonial construction and development. More and more merchants arrived to carry on legal and illegal trade. Even the Office of the Inquisition established a branch in Cartagena to make sure that material prosperity did not undermine religious orthodoxy.

Wealth attracted pirates, nasty fellows like Jean-François Roberval, Martin Cote, John Hawkins and Francis Drake. It also elicited the envious attention of rival European monarchs. Pirates and kings made life rough for the locals. Foreigners repeatedly sacked and burned the city. After each disaster the citizens patiently rebuilt their town, adding to its walls and fortifications and paying increasingly greater attention to its defensive needs. In 1697 Louis XIV sent Bernard Desjean and Jean Baptiste Ducasse, names familiar in Caribbean history, to capture the town. They failed. In 1741 during the War of Jenkins Ear, Admiral Edward Vernon besieged the city with a fleet of 186 ships and 23,600 men, largely recruited in the northern colonies. Among the recruits was Lawrence Washington, the half-brother of George Washington. The mission was a disaster. Nevertheless, young Washington was so taken with Vernon that he named his Virginia estate on the Potomac River in his honour.

By 1756 when the Seven Years War started, Cartagena was the most impregnable city anywhere in the Americas. It had eleven kilometres of sturdy walls with castles and sentry boxes, adequate storage facilities for food and weapons, as well as an intricate network of underground tunnels connecting the principal defensive positions. The Spanish viceroys moved their residence from Bogotá to Cartagena, reflecting the new status of the city. But the days of glory were relatively brief. With the outbreak of political independence after 1811, things started to fall apart rapidly.

The history of Cartagena after independence parallels the larger history of modern Colombia. Both have been woeful experiences of interrupted tragedy. At independence Cartagena had a population of nearly 30,000 inhabitants. By 1842 the population had fallen to slightly more than 4,000 in a city marked by abandonment and disrepair. Cartagena suffered like the rest of the country in the successive waves of violence that engulfed the country like the War of a Thousand Days between 1899 and 1903. At the end of the First World War the population was only a bit more than it had been at the time of independence.

The population slowly recovered in the early 20th century. Then the prolonged destructive period of civil war between 1946 and 1957 shattered city and country. It was the lowest point of despair for the people of Colombia and especially for those in Cartagena. But in 1957 the two contending political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals, negotiated a period of national unity that lasted until 1978.

The national unity government allowed municipalities throughout the country to develop local plans for regeneration. Bogotá concentrated on government, expanding its bureaucracy as far away as the islands of San Andres and Providencia. Santa Marta capitalised on the fact that Simón Bolívar, the founder of the nation, died there. San Pedro Alejandrino, the attractive suburban farmhouse where Bolívar died, failed to become a secular shrine comparable to Santiago de Compostela or Lourdes. Barranquilla placed its bet on medical services with surprisingly successful results. Medellín and Cali opted for extra-legal international activities that brought private fortunes and universal infamy.

Cartagena exploited its location and its history, becoming one of the earliest and most successful attempts at what later became heritage tourism. In the 1950s the city fathers started to restore the former architectural splendour of their city, carefully rebuilding the walls as well as the many convents, churches, public and private residences. It was a slow, costly process that paid off in 1984 when UNESCO declared the city a World Heritage Site. Although the nearby beaches were not as beautiful as those of Rodadero and Tayrona near Santa Marta, Cartagena built hotels along the spit of land called the Bocadero between the harbour and the sea offering an affordable destination for affluent Colombians. Local tourism eventually appealed to foreigners and boosted the fortunes of the city.

Today Cartagena is the fifth largest populated city in Colombia, with more than 1.2 million inhabitants and a Mecca for national and international tourism. Pulling back from an abyss is difficult but not impossible. In that Cartagena provides an exemplary case study.