Cartagena Afro Colombian History

The yellow arcade of the Plaza de los Coches defines the entrance to Cartagena’s walled city. During the seventeenth century, this space served as the primary slave market for the Americas. Captives arrived at the nearby harbor and were…

The Plaza de San Pedro Claver features a collection of scrap metal sculptures of animals, which stand in stark contrast to the heavy, colonial stone facade of the adjacent church. Pedro Claver lived in the monastery here during the…

The Palenquera statue in the Getsemani neighborhood depicts a woman in a vibrant, tiered dress holding a fruit-filled basket atop her head. She represents the women of San Basilio de Palenque, the first free town of enslaved people in the…

The Camellón de los Mártires is a long, tree-lined pedestrian promenade framed by white, arched colonial architecture. It serves as the historic entrance to the Walled City of Cartagena. In the early nineteenth century, this exact ground…

The bronze statue of a man with his hands unbound and chains broken at his wrists marks the center of Plazoleta Benkos Bioho. He represents the leader of the first free African settlement in the Americas, a village called San Basilio de…

Calle de la Sierpe displays a row of weathered colonial houses distinguished by their heavy wooden balconies and vivid, peeling paint. While the rest of Getsemaní evolved into a tourist hub, this street retained the grit of the nineteen…

Plaza de la Trinidad features a sun-bleached colonial church on one side and a collection of open-air restaurants that spill into the square. In eighteen eleven, this space became the center of Cartagena’s independence movement. Pedro…