18-05-2025
The Colombian city loved by Harry and Meghan (and it's safer than London)
When Alejandra Velasco visited London, she didn't dare take her phone out in public. In the Colombian city of Cartagena, she's walking around the backstreets wearing an enormous emerald pendant and matching earrings.
We've just been for dinner at her friends' restaurant (whose cauliflower tacos were so flavoursome, I had to ask the owners to confirm they hadn't given me meat by mistake). It's late, and the streets are quiet, but Alejandra seems impervious to any potential threat.
I too, feel at ease in her hometown. This Caribbean port seems less lawless and run-down than many of the British cities I've visited recently. There's hardly any litter, no intimidating groups of youth, and everywhere you go in its Unesco-listed old town, you'll see freshly painted restaurants and swish independent clothing stores.
Cartagena, though long considered one of Colombia's biggest tourism draws, has lately emerged as something of a South American St Tropez, helped in no small part by the country's dramatically improved crime rate. All the jet-set are coming to this unique city, which pairs a stunning, walled Spanish colonial old town and a Miami-like new town, with the added bonus of laid-back island getaways for snorkelling, sailing and scuba diving on its doorstep.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle visited last August, and Alejandra says she has served everyone from Asian royalty to Amazon's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, at her mother's emerald store, Lucy Jewelry. Her friend Diana, she adds, has met half of Hollywood volunteering at the international film festival held here each April. 'Will Smith, Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Owen Wilson...' She reeled off more than a dozen A-listers. It's quite the list, and likely to grow further – the luxury Four Seasons hotel chain is opening an enormous outpost opposite the 16th-century ramparts this summer.
It'll cement Cartagena's place on the luxury travel circuit. Not that this is the sort of destination you can only visit with an A-lister's bank balance.
While I used a local tour operator, Sulit Experiences, to arrange my airport transfers and a guided history walk, I organised everything else through the holiday comparison site Kayak. You can find return flights from the UK with well-timed connections for between £750 to £1,000, and there's no shortage of affordable yet sumptuous accommodation options.
The four-star Townhouse Art Hotel, for example, has spacious doubles from just £86, B&B, and comes with everything you could ask for in a sultry Latin stay – from a sexy piano lounge to a rooftop bar with plunge pools and sweeping views across the pantiles.
For a little more money – from £214, B&B – you can even stay in a converted bishop's palace, Casa Carolina. Incredibly chic, it has a zen-like pool built into its courtyard, with stepping stones connecting its lobby to the yoga studio at the far end. Influencers wander in off the street to sit on its rope swings and pose beside doric columns.
The city is just as Instagrammable – even its shopping mall is gouged into the old La Serrezuela bullring. Cartagena often doubles for New Orleans or Havana in films – although it's far grander. So much gold and silver passed through here during colonial times that it was almost constantly besieged by the French and English – including Sir Francis Drake. It's why the fortress and city walls are so monumental, and why every other building within its seven-mile-long battlements seems to be a sumptuous palazzo.
Most are now bars and restaurants, like Casa Bohême, whose collonaded courtyard and rooms have been turned into a series of restaurants and lounges by Parisian Franck Azoulay and his Vogue stylist wife, Jeannette.
The couple discovered Cartagena while touring the world, throwing glamorous parties for their high-end events brand. In many ways, this sophisticated city offers the sort of lifestyle they're used to when working in Ibiza or Tulum. A 30-minute speedboat ride, and they can be moored off some mangrove islet, partying or reclining on deck. It's part of what makes this historic city that little bit special.
As a tourist, you can book a trip to the nearby Rosario Islands for around £40pp. Or, for £205, you can charter your own 10-man vessel through Boating Cartagena, as I did.
These Caribbean islands are nothing like glitzy St Barts. One minute you're dropping anchor off a private beach owned by a Swiss billionaire. The next you're snorkelling on the reef, surrounded by men in kayaks making 'coco-loco' cocktails from the cool boxes on their prows.
On the car-free Tierra Bomba, I had to ride a horse to get between Amare Beach Club, where I had lunch, and the Blue Apple Beach House, where I'm told Jeff Bezos came to relax when he wasn't shopping for Colombian emeralds.
This beach club with rooms looks like any other cabana-fanned hangout in the Caribbean – except you won't find the usual pizzas and burgers on its menu. Blue Apple's Venezuelan chef Pedro Mosqueda has worked under several Michelin-starred maestros in the West. Colombia is full of first-rate, highly trained chefs like Pedro, who were keen to return to South America when the drug wars fizzled out. So many have come back that Blue Apple puts on regular 'secret suppers' so Pedro and other fine-dining protégés – now working in kitchens across Colombia – can come together and cook.
It's not just returnees who are transforming Colombia's food and drink scene. At Nia Bakery, back in the old town, I gorged on pastries topped with edible flowers and oozing with some of Colombia's 1,000 native fruits. The owners – Cali, one of the cities most affected by narco bombings and kidnappings – are trying to help farmers transition away from the drug trade they were once forced to participate in. They're also attempting to reclaim the coca leaf itself, using ground versions of it – known as mambé – to make ice creams and lattes.
It's not my cup of coffee, but I admire the ingenuity. Colombia has far more going for it than the troubled history Netflix seems determined to forever tar it with. At Lunatico Experience, they're trying to showcase their contemporary reality by hosting everything from cooking classes to rum tastings.
It's a message that needs shouting from the belfries. Even I came to Colombia with outdated preconceptions. As a vegetarian, I was dreading meal times. But I needn't have worried. Even seafood restaurants like Salon Tropical happily swap out ingredients to accommodate awkward travellers like me (using heart of palm and sweet potato in the ceviche, instead of the usual fish, for example). The chefs at Carmen Restaurant even prepared a meat-free version of their seven-course tasting menu at a moment's notice. Talk about the VIP treatment. I can see why Bezos and co have fallen for Cartagena.
