CARTAGENA

Which?	Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (1985)
What?	Colonial Caribbean-lapped city in Colombia where magic is made real

THE CITY is steaming. The downpour has stopped and now the temperature’s high as hell, the air hanging heavy with humidity, jasmine, birdsong and expectation. Yellow-red-pink walls burn in the sun. It seems barely a city at all but a lurid painting created in a fever dream; blurred brightness, hidden meanings. The shade of the square provides little escape. You’re still assaulted by the Caribbean heat, by the sound of heels clattering the cobblestones, by pecking pigeons, hawkers touting Cuban cigars, the sickly smooch of lovers. A hot breeze blows through, carrying not respite but stories – stories from out at sea, from the cannon-topped battlements, from behind closed shutters, from centuries past. Cartagena: a city of stories, where magic dances down every street …

Gabriel García Márquez was born in the Colombian river town of Aracataca, lived peripatetically between Europe, Cuba and Mexico City but is inextricably linked with Cartagena. He arrived in the coastal city in 1948, just as La Violencia – a ten-year civil war – broke across the country. He studied at Cartagena University, and worked as a newspaper reporter, but left after only a year, never to live there full time again. And yet, this city – its palette, its pulse – infuses his writing. Márquez once confessed that ‘all of my books have loose threads of Cartagena in them’.

This is never more apparent than in El Amor en los Tiempos del Cólera – Love in the Time of Cholera. The novel, based on the love affair of Márquez’s parents, is set in the ‘city of the Viceroys’, a port on the Magdalena River somewhere near the Caribbean Sea – unnamed by the author but oozing with the essence of Cartagena. The streets and squares are fictitious, but wandering the real-life city it’s impossible not to see the stage of Márquez’s love story: that of odd young romantic Florentino Ariza and his sweetheart Fermina Daza. After one ‘casual glance’ at 14-year-old Fermina, Florentino falls impossibly in love. He stalks Fermina across the city, mounting a vigil outside her half-ruined house, going places she might be, playing violin to her in church. When Fermina marries staid, respectable Dr Juvenal Urbino instead, Florentino continues to lurk around the city – on trams, down alleys, by the docks – racking up hundreds of sexual encounters while still proclaiming fidelity to Fermina. He waits 51 years, 9 months and 4 days to win her back.

Cartagena was founded by the Spanish in 1533. It was a literal treasure chest, used to store looted New World gold and silver before it was shipped back to Europe. The Spanish wrapped the city in sturdy ramparts to fend off attacks from buccaneers and Brits; these protective murallas (walls) were bolstered over subsequent centuries, becoming the most extensive fortifications in South America. Today, they continue to safeguard the Old Town’s cluster of handsome churches, bright-hued houses, tropical courtyards and terracotta tiles. It’s a confined, candy-coloured bubble, where magic might brew.

Cartagena is in better shape now than when Márquez arrived. The state of ruination, when ‘weeds hung from the balconies and opened cracks in the whitewashed walls of even the best-kept mansions’ has been reversed. Long known for guerrilla fighting, drugs trafficking and corruption, Colombia has cleaned up its act in the early 21st century. In Cartagena, houses have been restored and weeds replaced by tamed creepers and neat window boxes.

Indeed, the Old Town is as colourful, sensual and multi-sensory as Márquez’s imagination. Cumbia music pumps from bars and spills into the streets. Food is everywhere, from rainbow-bright lollipops to fried snacks sizzling in vats of hot oil on the pavements. Dark-skinned palenqueras, descendants of the first free slaves, sashay in their vibrant full-skirted dresses and costume jewels, balancing bowls overflowing with tropical fruit on their heads. They’ll pose for photos in exchange for tourist dollars. But then, the whole city is photogenic, from the elegant wrought-iron lampposts to the balconies dripping with bougainvillea. Flowers of all kinds – roses, gardenias, camellias – symbolise love in Márquez’s novel, and flourish in abundance on the real streets of Cartagena.

It’s possible to seek out Florentino and Fermina. Entering the Old Town via the main gate, walking under the clock tower, you enter the Plaza de los Coches, once used as a slave market. Across the square is the Portal de los Dulces, the colonnaded and tangerine-hued passageway that became Márquez’s Portal de los Escribanos, or Arcade of the Scribes. Florentino, rejected by Fermina, employed his literary powers here, writing missives for ‘unlettered lovers’, free of charge. You won’t find poets under the shade of the arches today, but rather a line of little stalls selling a tooth-stinging array of sweet confections: sugary pastries, caramel swirls, glass jars jammed with muñecas de leche (milk dolls) and coconut cocada sweets.

A little further north is leafy Plaza Fernández de Madrid, inspiration for the Parquecito de los Evangelios – the Little Park of the Evangelists – where love-lorn Florentino spent many hours, hoping to glimpse Fermina. There are benches where you can sit, like Florentino, ‘pretending to read a book of verse in the shade of the almond trees’. The Daza house was supposedly based on the white, vine-smothered mansion on the square’s eastern side.

Just like Márquez’s fictional city, Cartagena is a cauldron in which magic can brew. Where love can explode, colours can blind, parrots can kill. It is lyrical, vibrant, sweet and strange. It has, as Dr Urbino states, ‘no equal in the world’.