Cartagena - City of Colombia

Cartagena de Indias is a large city seaport on the northern coast of Colombia. Founded in 1533 by Spaniard Don Pedro de Heredia, and named after the port of Cartagena in Spain's Murcia region, it was a major center of early Spanish settlement in the Americas which had impressive development in the XVIII century as the de facto capital of the Viceroyalty of New Granada and as the main hub of commerce and transportation in the late viceroyal era, situation that is reflected in its alternative capitality today. Nowadays continues to be the economic hub of the Caribbean region as well as a popular tourist destination.

Cartagena de Indias was founded the 1st of June, 1533 by Spanish commander Pedro de Heredia, in the former seat of the indigenous Caribbean Calamarí village. See Juan de la Cosa.
Initially, life in the city was quite bucolic, with less than 2000 inhabitants and only one church. A few months after the disaster of the invasion of Cote , a fire burned the city to the ground and forced the creation of a Firefighting Squad, the first in the Americas.

Cartagena de Indias also with a rainy season typically in April-May and October-November.

Its important to note, that though the climate tends to be hot generally throughout the year, its always windy, and that is a factor to have in account that makes the climate livable and even comfortable. The months of November to February tend to be the most windy months in the year, giving an extra cooling to the low temperatures of those months.

Cartagena de Indias, has the blessing that while being a caribbean sea city, is never touched by the hurricanes that decimate other caribbean capitals like Havana, Santo Domingo, Kingston or San Juan. The reason of this is that the city is in the caribbean but in the mainland and also quite southernly, isolating it from the wind currents that feed the hurricanes. The last hurricane to arrive the city was the strange arrival Joanne in 1981, and was debilitated after passing Puerto Rico.

If there is a city in Colombia that has a rich and vibrant cultural life is Cartagena de Indias, besides the somehow oversized tourism industry, the city offers many cultural and educational options for all publics and has been and still is the cultural capital of the nation.

Cartagena gained modern notoriety in the 1984 hit movie, Romancing the Stone when romance novelist Joan Wilder travels to Cartagena to deliver a treasure map in an effort to ransom her kidnapped sister. The Cartagena scenes were actually filmed in Mexico, and it doesn't reflect the real Cartagena. In the Family Guy episode Barely Legal, the mayor, thinking the film to be real, sends all the police officers to Cartagena, which is referred to as being a fictional city.