The walled city and Getsemaní: a guide to Cartagena’s historic core
Everything most people picture when they think of Cartagena, the coral-stone walls, the flower-draped balconies, the narrow streets that dead-end into a plaza, happens inside about 1 square kilometer. That area breaks into three connected sectors: El Centro, San Diego, and Getsemaní. Each has a different personality, and knowing which is which changes how you spend your time here.
El Centro: the seat of colonial power
El Centro was the administrative, religious, and aristocratic heart of the city, and it still reads that way. Dense grid blocks, cobblestone streets, two-story mansions with overhanging wooden balconies dripping in bougainvillea.
Start at the Torre del Reloj, the baroque clock tower gate that’s the city’s main entrance. Originally called Boca del Puente, it was designed by Juan de Herrera y Sotomayor and updated in 1888 by Luis Felipe Jaspe. Walk through it and you land in Plaza de los Coches, a space with a hard history, it served as the city’s central commercial square and slave market. Today it’s lined with arches sheltering candy vendors at the Portal de los Dulces.
From there, Plaza de la Aduana is the largest plaza in the old city, once home to the royal customs house and the mansion of city founder Pedro de Heredia. Two buildings worth planning around:
- Palacio de la Inquisición, an 18th-century building that served as the tribunal and prison of the Spanish Holy Office until 1811. It’s now the Cartagena Historical Museum, and yes, the colonial torture instruments are still on display.
- Iglesia y Convento de San Pedro Claver, built between 1580 and 1654. It holds the remains of Jesuit priest Pedro Claver, known as the “Slave of the Slaves,” who spent 40 years ministering to enslaved Africans arriving through the port. This stop is a fixture on most guided city tours for good reason.
Round it out with the Catedral de Santa Catalina de Alejandría, a 16th-century Spanish Renaissance cathedral with marble floors and neoclassical gold-leaf altars.
San Diego: the quieter half
North of El Centro, San Diego was historically home to middle-class merchants and craftsmen rather than aristocracy, and it still feels calmer.
Las Bóvedas, the last colonial fortification built in the city (1789-1798, by the same Antonio de Arévalo who finished Cartagena’s harbor defenses), sits between the Santa Clara and Santa Catalina bastions. Its 47 semicircular porticos and 23 vaults did time as an ammunition depot, then flooded dungeons during later conflicts, before being restored in 1972 into a handicraft market, which is what you’ll find there now.
Nearby, Plaza e Iglesia de Santo Domingo has the oldest church in the city (construction started 1552) and Fernando Botero’s bronze sculpture La Gorda Gertrudis, one of the more photographed pieces of public art in Cartagena. Teatro Heredia, a neoclassical theater built in 1911 over the ruins of a 17th-century church, hosts performances to this day.
Getsemaní: the neighborhood that flipped
Getsemaní sits just outside the eastern walls, across what used to be the Centenario lagoon. It was historically the working-class, Afro-Colombian, artisan quarter, fortified by Governor Francisco de Murga in 1631, and it’s had the most dramatic transformation of the three sectors. What was once a rougher part of town is now the city’s creative center: colorful street art (locals call it Ciudad Mural), boutique hostels, and the best nightlife in Cartagena.
Plaza de la Trinidad is the neighborhood’s real center, where locals and travelers gather around street food stalls and live salsa most evenings. It’s also where independence was conceived on November 11, 1811, which gives the square more weight than its casual atmosphere suggests. A guided walking tour through Getsemaní’s murals and alleys is one of the more consistent inclusions on Cartagena city tours, and it usually ends near the Monumento de los Zapatos Viejos and the Cartagena de Indias letters, a popular photo stop.
Just at the border between Getsemaní and El Centro, Parque del Centenario (built 1911) is known for its resident sloths, monkeys, and iguanas, an odd but genuine slice of nature in the middle of the old town.
Old buildings, new uses
A defining trend across the walled city is adaptive reuse, historic military and religious buildings turned into hotels, restaurants, and shops:
- Sofitel Legend Santa Clara, inside the 1621 Convent of Saint Clare, with the former nuns’ dining hall now a wine cellar next to preserved crypts and confessionals.
- La Serrezuela, a modern shopping center built around a restored wooden bullring.
- Alma and Carmen, fine dining spaces built into colonial aqueducts and old fortress walls.
If you want the food side of this story in more depth, it’s covered in the Cartagena food guide.
Getting your bearings
The walled city and Getsemaní together cover roughly 1 km by 0.8 km, small enough that walking is genuinely the fastest way to see it, faster than a taxi in most cases. Morning is the better time to move between plazas before the heat sets in.
You can have a look at Exoticca’s Colombia travel packages to see the walled city and Getsemaní on a guided tour or continue learning about Cartagena and its surroundings.
