Colombia’s Caribbean Coast is centered around Cartagena and an eastern corner comprise of Santa Marta, Tayrona, Minca, and Aracataca. They are pressed between sea, forest, plantations, and mountains. Here everything moves to an unhurried yet vital tropical beat. It is a place of mixed bloodlines and mixed weather, where banana leaves, tin roofs, reggaeton, vallenato, mosque domes, mango trees, and migrating warblers all occupy the same sultry corner.
Every November, Cartagena pulses with memory—a city rehearsing its liberation, enveloped by the salty breath of the Caribbean and the echoes of its many-rooted past. If travel is, as I sometimes argue, an act of cultural espionage, then these independence festivities invite the curious and the empathetic to witness a rare blend of spectacle and meaning..
Cartagena was the first province in Colombia to declare independence from Spain in 1811. The movement brought together people from many backgrounds—enslaved Africans, freed people, Indigenous groups, Spanish liberals, mestizos—all contributing to the city’s changing identity.
What sets Cartagena’s November celebration apart is not just the color and musical bravado, but the layers of world history that collide here. There is a European story, of course—Spain’s reach and retreat, Enlightenment whispers swirling in colonial plazas. But it is the African and indigenous threads that animate the parades, the rhythms, even the flavor of the coastal kitchens. The city’s independence was declared not with a single voice, but as a polyphonic chorus: the enslaved, the free, the indigenous Tayrona descendants, Spanish liberals, mestizos. The city’s streets still carry the cadence of this plurality.
Colombia’s Caribbean coast has surprised me. I never thought the Caribbean was for me, but Colombia does it exceedingly well. It is a layered place, dense with races and cultures, humidity and architecture, and musical styles—all of them loud and unapologetic. Exotic fruits appear everywhere—in street carts and chilled juices and elaborate cakes—each one a small, fragrant announcement that this country is blessed with abundance. Migrating birds trace their own paths overhead (I never did see a seagull), adding movement to an already restless tableau.
In Cartegena, police are everywhere, smartly dressed, half of them women, and never alone, not even on a motorbike. People gather in clusters, dressed in white linen shirts and pants, as if color itself would be an act of aggression against the heat. Everything moves to an unhurried, vibrant beat under a tropical sun. Things here feel old. Colonial Spain—memory and midwife—still hovers over banana plantations, beaches, lagoons, and even the snow-capped peaks improbably squeezed into this narrow corner of Colombia. I head to Medellín tomorrow, but I suspect some part of me will remain here, along this coast.
My final stop on the Caribbean was Aracataca, the hometown of Gabriel García Márquez. Before coming, I reread One Hundred Years of Solitude, let News of a Kidnapping and The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor play in my ears, and was unexpectedly captured by the newly published Until August. By the time I arrived, I was already carrying his Colombia with me as a kind of second map.
A century ago, this area drew workers and dreamers from Spain, Indigenous communities, formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants, and Arab migrants, all grafted onto the same steamy terrain in the service of banana wealth and the foreign companies that profited from it. In December 1928, not far from here, striking banana workers were gunned down by the Colombian army acting to protect corporate interests, an event whose death toll still wavers in the record yet remains searingly fixed in collective memory. That massacre later re-emerged, transmuted but unmistakable, in the pages of a novel about a place called Macondo, where the line between history and myth is less a border than a fog bank.
Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca in 1927 and spent his early childhood here with his retired army-colonel grandfather and a grandmother whose stories stretched reality the way the afternoon heat stretches time. Walk through the Casa Museo, past the bedrooms and courtyard, then step back into the street and you can feel how his world was assembled: banana company offices and barracks, gossiping neighbors, train whistles, priests, soldiers, and the slow swiveling gaze of a town watching the outside world arrive and depart again.
Today, the town is covered with murals of his avuncular face, painted on buildings and along the canal. Sculptures appear at odd intervals, as if he might stroll past at any moment. Some might find it shabby or overdone. But if you are not rushed, if you let the heat slow you and listen to the guides in the modest museums, their affection for a writer—for a man of words—begins to work on you. The attention given to his memory, the insistence that language matters, endeared the place to me.
Sources say García Márquez once reflected, “For all that ends and all that remains, thank you for being part of my life.” I can’t say it any better about the places I’ve visited and the ones that have quietly rearranged something inside me. I am grateful for them all.
To be Colombiano, I’m starting to understand, is to love music—loud music, very loud music. It is to love sweetness in all its forms: not just carrot cake, but confections and juices and things made with fruit in a country blessed with more varieties than I can name, available on nearly every corner. It is to know how to dress for heat in white linen, to practice a kind of urban camping amid street art and concrete, to move through daily life accompanied by rhythm. You should come see it.