A Remote Colombian City That Really Does Exist

Nicholas Gill

The first time I heard of Mompós, officially called Santa Cruz de Mompox, was about a decade ago, while reading Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The General in His Labyrinth. “Mompox doesn’t exist,” García Márquez wrote, “we sometimes dream about her, but she doesn’t exist.” For years, I assumed that to be true.

It wasn’t until 2008, when an acquaintance, a British journalist in Colombia named Richard McColl, began building a hotel there, that I realized that Mompós—a perfectly preserved colonial city nearly five hundred years old, set on an island in the Magdalena River—was indeed real. In fact, the region, rich in history and ripe with romanticism, was the setting of many of García Márquez’s most famous works.

There is nothing directly associated with the author in the city—no statues or plaques—but the area, and particularly the river, heavily informed his writing. Mompós, and nearby towns like Sucre, where the events portrayed in the novella Chronicle of a Death Foretold actually transpired, and where García Márquez, who died April 17, 2014, at his home in Mexico City, lived for many years during his youth, suddenly seemed like destinations infused with the spirit of his tales. “I traveled the Magdalena River eleven times, back and forth,” he once said in an interview. “I know every village and every tree on that river.”

For me, the biggest obstacle was getting there. Mompós is close to nowhere. Overland routes involve combinations of buses and ferries, and while a bridge in nearby Magangué is said to be planned for this year and roads are being improved, traveling from Bogotá still takes ten hours.

From Cartagena I took Toto Express, a pickup truck that seats five and stops at your hotel. It arrived a few minutes after 4:30 a.m., and we drove inland for nearly two hundred miles on semi-paved and dirt roads, across seven hours of tropical scrubland, until reaching the banks of the Magdalena, where a car ferry helped us across.

Mompós is home to some 30,000 residents, many of whom live within the forty blocks of colonial-era buildings that date to the town’s heyday from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, when it was a strategic trading route for tobacco, slaves, and precious metals on their way from the Andes to the coast. As the river silted up in the early nineteenth century and the current shifted directions, Mompós fell out of favor as a transit point and its influence began to wane. Eventually, it was all but forgotten.

During some of Colombia’s most tumultuous years in the 1980s, the Magdalena Valley was accessible only during certain hours of the day. It remained that way until the mid-1990s—UNESCO named the historic center of Mompós a World Heritage Site in 1995—when the region began to open back up as threats from drug cartels and paramilitary groups began to dissipate.

During my visit, speculation was swirling on what the future holds. Along the waterfront, prices for real estate have risen. Some foresee a small boom fueled by wealthy Colombians wanting to come in and renovate old buildings. For now, though, that seems a long way off. Mule-driven carts still far outnumber cars. Outside of a jazz festival held each October and Holy Week celebrations, when every room in town is taken, on most days Mompós sees just a handful of visitors.

I checked in at La Casa Amarilla, which McColl runs with his wife, Alba Torres, whose family is from Mompós. McColl has gradually fixed up the seventeenth-century building, transitioning from a simple hostel to a proper boutique hotel, adding air-conditioning and LCD TVs. We were soon ambling along the waterfront, passing the bright yellow Santa Bárbara Church, with its baroque bell tower and gilded altars that date to 1613. A man rolled a wooden cart with freshly cut slabs of raw pork on it, as a woman beside him called out “cerdo, cerdo, cerdo,” like a vendor selling peanuts at a baseball game.

While we dined on fried bocachico (a local freshwater fish) and coconut rice at El Comedor Costeño, set right on the river, a boat appeared in the distance. Someone shouted out that it was carrying “La Virgen,” a nationally famous image of the Virgin of Chiquinquirá. It was on a peace mission, I was told, traveling to towns along the Magdalena. A crowd of a hundred paraded the image through the streets, stopping at every church and singing hymns, rousing what is otherwise a sleepy place.

That drowsy rhythm is in large part due to the sweltering heat, which dictates the course of the day. At sunrise, schoolgirls in plaid skirts walked to class and men with straw hats unloaded bananas and pineapples from dugout canoes. During the peak of the day, Mompós was at its quietest. Most stay in and those who don’t head to El Comedor Costeño for limonada sweetened with panela, unrefined cane sugar.

On Plaza Tamarindo, two blocks inland from the river, women were selling chicha, a corn-based drink served in a gourd, while men carried trays of queso de capa, balls of a stringy mozzarella-like cheese, some stuffed with guava paste. At a silver filigree workshop, a handful of men sat in a courtyard making delicate jewelry, a holdout from the days when gold and silver regularly passed through.

In the evenings, when bats swoop down into the streets, locals congregate at Café Tinto on Plaza de la Concepción, where I sat in a rocking chair with a beer and listened to recordings of Beethoven and Vivaldi. For dinner, many opt for the plaza in front of Santo Domingo Church, where a dozen food and juice stalls set up each evening.

An Austrian, Walter Maria Gurth, runs El Fuerte, a surprisingly sophisticated restaurant inside the Fort of San Anselmo, which was built by slaves and was where Simón Bolívar gathered his troops for his campaign to free the continent from Spanish rule.

The leaves of banana trees hung over tables made from tree trunks, and a guadua bamboo roof covered the main dining room; all of it was made on-site by Gurth, who once made a living restoring old planes and sailboats. (“Everything is for sale,” the menu read, “except our pets.”) A wood-burning oven fired thin-crust pizzas with toppings like house-made speck and blue cheese. Chilean wine and Campari-and-sodas were followed by shots of homemade grappa.

On the last of my four days in Mompós, I hired a boatman named Henri to take me downriver, to agrarian and fishing villages yet more remote. We cut through streams and wetlands, where herons flew over fields of yucca and howler monkeys slept in the trees.

Henri pointed out watermarks from a flood in 2010, which stood about three feet up the walls of many houses, some still piled high with sandbags. I asked how many days the flood lasted. “Days? Seven months,” Henri said. “In Mompós they thought it was the end of the world.”

He added, with a straight face: “It was a good year for the fishermen, though.”

Back at La Casa Amarilla, I asked McColl about the flooding. “The Depresión Momposina is an incredible but fragile and special wetland in that it acts as a sponge for the rest of the country,” he said. “Over the past fifty years and more, all the lowland tropical forest has been cut back to allow for cattle grazing, which was seen as the source of economic wealth. Now, we are paying the price.”

Flooding of that magnitude had not occurred in eighty years. Back then, they brought the Cristo Negro, a black Christ figure, from San Agustín Church in Chile to the Magdalena, where they washed its feet—and it’s said that the waters receded. In 2010, they did the same, and the water again receded. While that may have had something to do with it being the end of the rainy season, it’s nice to know there’s a place where something so preposterously fantastic—the sort of thing that one might read in a García Márquez story, actually—just might not be fiction.

Originally published in May 2014.

Nicholas Gill writes frequently about food and travel in Latin America, and sometimes other places. He lives in Brooklyn and in Lima, Peru.