DAMARTES: the coconut-shell workshop turning a Cartagena fishing village into a story of independence

Walk along the beach at La Boquilla, an Afro-Caribbean fishing village about 15 km up the coast from Cartagena, and you’ll see coconut shells everywhere, split open, drained, and left to dry in the sun outside beachfront kitchens. To most people, that’s rubbish. To a group of women who first picked up sandpaper and a carving knife here in 2008, it became something else entirely: jewellery, keychains, vases, and, eventually, financial independence.

The group is called DAMARTES, short for Damas y Madres del Arte, “Ladies and Mothers of Art.” It’s a small name for a project that’s had an outsized effect on this village, and a genuinely worthwhile stop if you’re spending time around Cartagena.

From a craft class to a cooperative

DAMARTES started life under a rather different name: Madres Cabeza de Familia y sus Cocos, roughly “single mothers and their coconuts.” In 2008, seven women from La Boquilla, all facing real financial hardship, took part in a craft class sponsored by the local Proboquilla foundation, where they learned the basics of working with coconut shells as a raw material.

What followed wasn’t an easy rise. The group went through genuine hardship, failed attempts, financial loss, and a distinct lack of outside support in the early years. There was resistance closer to home too. When the women started earning their own income, many of their husbands were initially unhappy about it, uneasy with something that pushed against the traditional social and patriarchal structure of the village. It took time, and it took the group’s work actually succeeding, but eventually those same husbands, and the wider community, came round completely. Today, DAMARTES is run entirely by local mothers and grandmothers, and it’s remembered locally as the first group of women in La Boquilla to generate independent income of their own.

That’s the part of the story that’s easy to miss if you only see the finished jewellery. The craft is the product. The independence is the point.

Turning a discarded shell into something wearable

Every piece DAMARTES makes starts as a coconut shell that would otherwise be thrown away, an abundant, free material in a village where coconuts are part of daily life and daily meals. The women hand-sand, carve, shape, polish, and assemble each shell into finished pieces, a slow, entirely manual process that runs roughly like this: raw shell, sanding and carving, assembly, polishing, finished piece.

The product range has grown well beyond simple souvenirs:

• Jewellery: earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings
• Accessories: belts, keychains, and other coconut-shell pieces
• Home decor: decorative vases, containers, and standalone art pieces

None of it is mass-produced. Each item carries the slight variation you’d expect from something carved and sanded by hand rather than stamped out by a machine, which is arguably the whole appeal.

Why this matters beyond the craft itself

It’s worth being direct about why DAMARTES gets singled out among the many artisan visits on offer around Cartagena: it’s a genuine, community-run example of what responsible, community-based tourism is supposed to look like, rather than a marketing line borrowed for the brochure.

The women of DAMARTES didn’t just create a product line, they created the first source of independent income many of them had ever had, in a village where that kind of financial autonomy for women wasn’t the norm. It shifted family dynamics, gave the women a genuine voice in community leadership, and turned what could have been a footnote into a working model of gender equality funded, quite literally, by rubbish nobody else wanted. That’s the kind of sustainable local development that gets talked about a lot in travel marketing and delivered rather less often.

What the workshop visit is actually like

DAMARTES isn’t a shop you glance into on your way past. It’s a proper hands-on experience, and it’s popular enough to feature on itineraries run by operators including G Adventures/National Geographic Journeys alongside a number of local Cartagena-based tour companies.

Visits typically follow the same structure:

• The setting: a rustic, open-air beachside restaurant in La Boquilla, looking straight out over the Caribbean Sea, about as far from a sterile workshop space as you can get.
• The welcome: a cold, fresh coconut drink on arrival, alongside an introduction to what coconuts actually mean in Afro-Caribbean coastal culture, food, craft, and daily life all at once.
• The storytelling: the women themselves talk you through the history of DAMARTES, including the personal struggles behind it, not a scripted potted history read off a laminated card, but their own account of what building this actually took.
• The hands-on part: a guided, step-by-step session where you sand, carve, and assemble your own coconut-shell souvenir, a bracelet, necklace, pair of earrings, or keychain, under the artisans’ direction, and take it home with you afterwards.

Most tours built around the visit include transport from central Cartagena to La Boquilla and back, a bilingual guide, the welcome drink, materials, the guided workshop itself, and your finished piece. Some also offer a traditional Afro-Caribbean lunch or a traditional African hair-braiding session (taller de trenzas africanas) as optional add-ons, and it’s often paired with a mangrove kayak or canoe trip, a local Afro-Colombian drumming session (Batambora), or a street art walk elsewhere in the city, making it easy to build into a fuller day rather than a standalone stop.

Worth the detour from Cartagena

La Boquilla doesn’t get anywhere near the attention the walled city does, and most visitors never make it up the coast to see it. That’s exactly what makes DAMARTES worth the short trip. It’s a chance to meet the people actually behind a piece of Cartagena’s craft economy, understand a genuinely difficult social shift that happened within living memory, and leave with something handmade that means rather more than a souvenir bought off a stall.

Several of Exoticca’s Colombia holidays include a DAMARTES coconut-workshop experience as part of the wider Cartagena itinerary, either built in or available as an optional add-on. Take a look at Exoticca’s Colombia packages to see how easily an afternoon in La Boquilla fits alongside everything else Cartagena has to offer.