Cartagena de Indias

A 16-minute flight from Barranquilla brings Cartagena into view, with its excellent natural harbor and series of waterways. Spanish colonizer Pedro de Heredia is to be commended for his choice when founding Cartagena de Indias here in 1533. And each year more vacationers discover Cartagena too, as they come to sun and bathe on the beaches of Boca Grande Peninsula and visit the ancient sites that retell the city’s colonial past.

From the vantage point of Fort San Felipe de Barajas overlooking the bay, historically minded tourists can imagine the harbor below full of Spanish sailing vessels, such as the famous Tierra Firme galleon fleets, that took on gold from the mainland and, with favorable winds, set sail with their precious cargo to Spain.

But Cartagena once dreaded foreigners because of forays by pirates. Fleets of French, British, and Dutch corsairs plundered Spanish ports and galleons. Cartagena was sacked by the privateer John Hawkins and then by his audacious nephew, Sir Francis Drake; both were sailing for England and both were Protestants. Drake’s father, in fact, was a Protestant preacher. Sir Francis Drake’s seizure and holding of Cartagena for ransom in 1586 was one of the grievances that provoked Philip II to launch the great Spanish Armada against Protestant England in 1588​—a turning point in European and world history.

Free From Superstitious Fears

The story of Colombian gold is incomplete without mentioning the slaves. African blacks became the principal mine workers, and Cartagena “was transformed into the most important slave market in the Caribbean​—perhaps in the entire New World.”

[Pictures on page 101]

Cartagena, an important Caribbean seaport in Spanish colonial history, hears the good news