Cartagena
Monday, February 5,
2018 Cartagena
My brother-in-law Lee
wrote, “When I lived in Colombia during my Peace Corps days in 1966-1968 we
referred to Avianca as Avianunca. (Never fly).”
Well, the planes that don’t fly are updated, but they still don’t fly. The non-stop from Medellin to Cartagena on
Sunday, a very short flight, was cancelled.
We had to fly from Medellin to Bogota and then Bogota to Cartagena. It took most of the day, and we arrived at
our hotel in Cartagena in the late afternoon.
Our non-stop home tomorrow from Cartagena to Miami is cancelled. We’re currently scheduled to fly
Cartagena-Bogota-Miami, and will arrive in Miami after our flight to Rochester
leaves. Avianunca indeed.
We took a long walk around
Old Cartagena last evening. The
temperature was in the high 80s and the humidity felt like 100%. It’s an old walled city, with charming
streets and plazas, all crowded with tourists, most of whom are speaking
Spanish. There’s much Afro-Caribbean
influence here, and we came upon this in Simon Bolivar Plaza:
We had a lovely outdoor dinner
and got back to the hotel in time for the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl. I
guess Belichick and Brady are not gods.
This morning we had a
comprehensive lecture on the writings and life of Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
Colombia’s Nobel Prize-winning author.
Joyce has begun One Hundred Years
of Solitude but is having trouble getting into it. I’ve not read any of his work, but people are
saying that Love in the Time of Cholera
is easier.
We then visited the 18th
c. San Felipe Fortress:
The stories of attacks by
the British (Sir Francis Drake), the French, pirates, and the defenses put up
by Spain over centuries are remarkable. This
fortress was the largest and most important of the Spanish defenses in all the
Americas, and we heard that history on site.
The fortress is built mostly of coral from a reef offshore, which was
destroyed to make the fortress:
There were three different sized cannons
atop the fortress, some of which could reach over 1 km.:
The view of part of
downtown Cartagena from the fortress is lovely:
From the fortress we went
to the Heredia Theater, named for the father of the city, Don Pedro Heredia,
and built as a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the city’s
founding, which was in 1811, so the theater was built in 1911. It was restored in 1998.
We then went to the very
difficult Inquisition Museum. The
Inquisition came late to Colombia—it arrived in Peru in the 1570s, but it
wasn’t until 1610 that two inquisitors arrived in Cartagena from Peru. Once they got started, however, it was fully
implemented, and the museum has some horrible devices to torture and maim and kill. There’s a prominent portrait of Torquemada,
the priest who started it all:
I won’t post any photos of
the horrors within the museum; suffice it to say that the Inquisition lasted
here until independence, in 1811.
Our final visit was to the
sanctuary and church named for San Pedro Claver, a remarkable priest who
confronted the slave trade and saved many Africans who had been shipped to
Colombia to work. His story is
impressive, and the sanctuary is lovely:
His canonization and
beatification are celebrated in the church named for him; the panels in the stained-glass
portion of the dome tell his story:
Tonight we had our
goodbye dinner, and tomorrow we leave for home.
Who knows when we’ll get there! Unless something extraordinary happens, this will be the last post for this blog.
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