Whereas your journey plans could also be on maintain, you may fake you’re someplace new for the evening. Across the World at Dwelling invitations you to channel the spirit of a brand new place every week with suggestions on easy methods to discover the tradition, all from the consolation of your own home.
On a transparent day, from the 17th-century La Popa Convent on the crest of a 500-foot hill, the view of Cartagena can set off delicate vertigo. Slowly, utilizing the skyline as your guidepost to the Colombian port metropolis, you may start to get your bearings. That unbelievable cluster of skyscrapers is Bocagrande, a neighborhood the place seashore resorts share area with gleaming workplace towers. Subsequent within the panorama is the walled outdated metropolis, the place slim alleyways join colonial-era church buildings with brightly coloured retailers and eating places. In between the 2 neighborhoods is one other: Getsemani, unremarkable from afar however, on nearer inspection, a veritable road artwork gallery exploding with artistic power.
From excessive up, it may be onerous to inform, however it is a metropolis so filled with magic that it impressed whole books by the Nobel Prize-winning creator Gabriel García Márquez; even after he settled in Mexico City, he continued to keep a house here. Maybe that’s because Cartagena’s magic leaves an indelible mark in your memory, even as it fuels your imagination. I still remember my first visit, over 20 years ago, as part of a bigger trip to my mother’s home country. In my mind’s eye, the blue of that sea under the bright Caribbean sun is bluer than anything I’ve seen since.
Cartagena has long been a top stop for international visitors to Colombia. The city managed to escape the worst of the country’s drug-related violence, though it continues to struggle with issues of police brutality and racial inequities.
Folks come to town for glimpses of its historical past; it was as soon as certainly one of Spain’s most profitable (and extractive) world outposts. However they find yourself falling in love with rather more: the nightclubs that buzz till the early hours of the morning with musicians from throughout the area; the seafood and fried treats; and the much less tangible methods it unlocks creativity. There’ll come a time once we can expertise town on the bottom once more, however within the meantime there are just a few approaches to channeling town’s magic from the consolation of dwelling.
Get a style of magical realism
In response to the Cartagenera novelist Margarita García Robayo, it’s unattainable not to attract connections between her hometown and the books of Gabriel Gárcia Márquez, who died in 2014. “If you have read García Márquez, there is no way you can go to Cartagena and not hear all the alarm bells of recognition,” said Ms. García Robayo, whose collection “Fish Soup” contains explorations of life on Colombia’s Caribbean coast.
Many individuals don’t understand how influential town of Cartagena, the place Mr. Gárcia Márquez labored for a time as a journalist, was to his writing. A few of his most imaginative scenes — males with large wings, blood that may transfer up staircases, ghosts extra susceptible to conversing than haunting — appear much less far-fetched when you will have spent a day misplaced within the metropolis’s sun-dappled, cobblestone streets. And studying his books will convey you proper into these streets, magic and all. It’s why the creator mentioned he was extra involved with fact than fantasy. “The issue is that Caribbean actuality resembles the wildest creativeness,” Mr. García Márquez told The Paris Review in 1981. For one thing immediately associated to town, begin with one of many creator’s most celebrated novels, “Love within the Time of Cholera.” Even though town within the guide is rarely named, you can find whispers of Cartagena all through.
Get an schooling in champeta
“Cartagena is a metropolis filled with sound,” Ms. Gárcia Robayo informed me. “The folks converse in shouts, music blares at deafening volumes and at all times, at all times there’s laughter within the background.” That’s so much to recreate in your lounge, however right here’s the place to start out: champeta, the Afro-Colombian dance music that blares from picós, or brightly coloured sound techniques arrange on road corners throughout town. The lyrics are sung in Spanish and Palenquero, a Spanish-based Creole spoken within the close by city of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free African settlement in the Americas. Melodies were originally derived from the dance music of South Africa, Congo and Ghana, which showed up on the docks of Cartagena and Barranquilla in the hands of West African sailors in the 1970s and ’80s. Once stigmatized and associated with delinquency — an outlook born from centuries of colonialism, racism and inequality — in recent years, champeta has begun to take its rightful place as the trademark sound of the Colombian Caribbean.
To feel like you are having a night out in Cartagena, put on the kind of songs you would hear at nightclubs like Bazurto Social Club or at pop-up picós away from the vacationers, exterior the walled metropolis. Begin with this tailor-made playlist, that includes some large names in champeta and associated genres. In case you are feeling significantly bold, attempt your hand at the accompanying champeta dance moves.
Take a digital music tour
In fact, champeta isn’t the one fashion of music you’ll hear in Cartagena, so to get a fuller immersion into the sounds of Colombia that converge within the metropolis’s streets join a digital tour. Impulse Travel, a Colombian tour company that works with neighborhood organizations, is providing a digital model of its “Sounds of Colombia” tour, condensing the 8-day trip into an hourlong digital expertise, which they’re providing on-demand.
“We had been fortunate to have captured quite a lot of footage and high-quality audio recordings from the journeys we had made prior to now,” Rodrigo Atuesta, Impulse Journey’s chief government informed me. “So we put collectively a digital expertise to make folks journey by the soundscape of this distinctive journey.” You may not be dancing at sundown to the sound of an accordion or watching craftspeople carve conventional flutes, however squint (and sip sufficient Dictador Rum as an accompaniment) and also you may assume you might be.
Dance whilst you prepare dinner
Cartagena is among the many finest locations within the nation to attempt Colombian delicacies, a hearty and scrumptious fusion of African, Indigenous and Spanish culinary traditions. Whereas there are a selection of dishes over at New York Times Cooking to attempt, why not get cooking with the assistance of an area, to actually really feel like you might be there? And, as a result of we’re speaking about Cartagena right here, this cooking class comes with music.
Foodies, a Colombian meals tour firm, is providing a web based “Arepas and Dancing” expertise, the place friends will learn to make arepas, a pancake-like delight made out of corn, accompanied by a killer soundtrack. You’ll attempt your hand at arepa de huevo, a yellow arepa filled with egg and floor beef, and a white arepa with anise. In Cartagena, arepas de huevo (or empanadas de huevo, as they’re typically confusingly referred to as) are discovered in all places throughout town, together with on the picós. So, to make you are feeling such as you actually are taking a break from the champeta blaring out of sound techniques, Foodies has a playlist to accompany the entire course of.
End off with one thing candy
You might have navigated the twists of Cartagena by the written phrase, danced to the stomach-churning bass of champeta music, and tried your hand at an area specialty. Now it’s time to wind down with some dessert. Cocadas are little coconut-based treats discovered all through Latin America. However for a number of the finest, it’s important to go to Cartagena and hunt down the palenqueras, the Afro-Caribbean ladies from San Basilio de Palenque who’ve the confections right down to an artwork.
AfroLatinx Travel, a tour firm that focuses on Latin America’s African heritage, is providing an online cocada-making presentation with María Miranda, a Cartagena-based cocada grasp. Together with an introduction to a wealthy culinary heritage, Ms. Miranda’s class affords a reminder of our duties as vacationers, digital or in any other case, the necessity for respect as guests and the underlying trauma that permeates Cartagena’s historical past.
“In Cartagena, we regularly see these ladies of their brightly coloured clothes and their merchandise on the market,” the expertise’s description reads. “Nevertheless, can we see them past their colonial fashion gown and merchandise on the market? These are actual ladies. These Black ladies have fought to stay in areas which have despised their presence. These ladies usually are not vacationer sights.”
