We spent an afternoon visiting the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas, the largest Spanish fort built in the Americas, located about a 5 minute drive from the walled city. We enjoyed walking around the fort and its underground tunnels, but our favorite aspect of the fort was the great view it provides of Cartagena.
Playa Blanca
Our guidebook indicated, and friends in Bogota confirmed, that the beaches in Cartagena are not very nice. So we decided to spend the day at Playa Blanca, a beach on Isla Barú located 45 minutes by speed boat from Cartagena. The beach is gorgeous with white sand and turquoise waters. I recommend taking one of the speed boats that goes directly to Playa Blanca in the morning from the Muelle Turistico, the boat harbor located near the clock tower entrance to the walled city. The beach is very quiet, secluded and relaxed for most of the day. However, beginning around 2:00 PM large ferry boats full of tourists visiting the Islas del Rosario (Isla Baru is the final stop on the tour) begin to arrive and the beach becomes crowded with lots of vendors offering food, jewelry and massages. They can be quite persistent, so it can be a bit harder to relax. Minh and I avoided them by spending most of the afternoon in the ocean.
Restaurants and nightlife
Cartagena has many restaurants. These were our favorites:
La Mulata - Restaurant on Calle Quero. We had some delicious robalo (snook fish) in a seafood sauce, and shrimp in garlic sauce. This restaurant also has great natural fruit juices, and Minh had a delicious limonada de coco.
Torre Luna - Restaurant on Calle del Curato with a great selection of seafood and vegetarian dishes. We had some great fish with coconut rice, but were particularly impressed with how delicious the hummus was that we had as a starter.
La Cocina de Carmela - Lunchtime only venue located on Badillo Segunda. We enjoyed salmon salpicon, and pork with mora (tart berry that grows in Colombia) sauce. We also had tomate de arbol (tree tomato) juice.
Pizza en el Parque - A hole-in-the-wall place in Parque Fernandez de Madrid with fantastic pizzas. It’s basically a take-out place, so everyone enjoys their pizzas in the park across the street. We actually found this place because there were so many people eating pizza in the park and it smelled really, really good. Once we sat down, we saw that the same thing happened to others passing by.
Cartagena also has great nightlife. We loved having drinks at Cafe del Mar, a bar located on top of the wall at Baluarte de Santo Domingo with stunning views of the old city and the ocean. We also enjoyed a bar called Donde Fidel, located at the Paseo de los Dulces, that has lots of outdoor seating and plays great Salsa music. We also enjoyed a few beers at a place called Whisky Bar with outdoor seating facing the Parque Fernandez de Madrid.
On our final night in Cartagena, Minh and I rode a Rumba Chiva. Chivas are rustic, colorful buses originally used for transportation in rural parts of Colombia. A Rumba Chiva is a party bus, and the ones in Cartagena take you on a tour of the city at night with a final stop at a dance club. Rumba Chivas include a band that plays cumbia and vallenato music, all the Colombian rum and coke you can consume during the ride, and fried Colombian snacks - in our case, arepas de huevo and empanadas de queso. We had a great time drinking, listening to the band, and occasionally dancing on the Rumba Chiva. We also had a lot of fun at the club dancing to salsa, merengue and reggaeton.
It sounds like you guys are having an incredible time! I'm just catching up on your posts now but It's exciting reading about everything you are experiencing.
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