In April 1948, Gabriel García Márquez left his studies in Bogotá to escape La Violencia, the clash between conservatives and liberals that would result in over 200,000 deaths over the next 15 years. He flew to Barranquilla and boarded a bus bound for Cartagena. When they arrived, the driver announced it as “La Heroica” – the emblematic nickname Simón Bolívar gave the city during the Spanish reconquest of 1815.
Cut off from all resources, the people of Cartagena chose to die of starvation rather than surrender. Only after 105 days, when the city had lost a third of its inhabitants to disease and hunger, and with their leaders captured and executed, did the Spanish manage to re-occupy it.
García Márquez meant the move to only be temporary. Little did he know that Cartagena would inspire so much of his writing, and he would keep returning here even after his exile.
Views of the Caribbean Sea
Las Murallas
In Love in the Time of Cholera, García Márquez’s second most famous book, Florentino Ariza first glimpses Fermina Daza while delivering a letter to her father “in one of the oldest houses… it was half in ruins” across the Park of Evangels. This is where he would sit hidden in the shade of almond trees to watch her leave and arrive from school everyday.
Today the white house is beautifully restored with a flowered balcony over the parrot door and it can still be seen from Plaza de Madrid. In colonial Cartagena, the more elaborate doors meant higher social status while the door knockers signified professions.
The house where Fermina Daza grows up in Love in the Time of Cholera
The flowered balcony over a parrot door as described in the book
Just across town is Plaza Bolívar. On one side is a colonnade. In the book, it’s the “Arcade of Scribes,” where Florentino Ariza buys his books and gives away love letters he’s written. In colonial times the Portal de los Escribanos was where calligraphers wrote love letters and made up other documents for the illiterate poor, and where books banned by the Spanish were sold in secret (like ones that contained spells to cast against conquerors). Today it houses museums and leads to the Portal de los Dulces, where rows of Afro-Colombian women sell candies made of coconut and tamarind.
Portal de los Escribanos turned into Portal de las Dulces today.
García Márquez’s own father tried to sell love letters here, but only ended up giving them away. And for those who could not afford to mail them, he added money and considered it charity. Yes – the lifelong lovers in Love in the Time of Cholera were inspired by García Márquez’s own parents.
And Plaza Bolívar itself was deeply connected to the author from the beginning. Lacking accommodations on his first night in Cartagena, García Márquez fell asleep on a bench here and was detained by the police for breaking curfew. Later he would keep returning to the plaza to think and write. Simón Bolívar, the great revolutionary who liberated Latin America, was one of his heroes, as he immortalized as the enigmatic leader in The General in His Labyrinth.
Plaza Bolívar
Upon entering the city, García Márquez found Plaza de los Coches. In colonial times, it was known as Portal de los Mercaderes, a central marketplace for trade, most notably slaves. In Of Love and Other Demons, it is here that three slaves for sale are bitten by a rabid dog that then goes to bite another girl at the marketplace.
Plaza de los Coches, the entrance to the city, was once a thriving slave market.
These iconic Palenqueras are descendants of the runaway slaves from San Basilio de Palenque who declared their independence from Spain in 1691. It was the first free town in the Americas.
On October 16, 1949, the chief editor of El Universal, where García Márquez worked, asked him to cover a story at Santa Clara Hospital, a once-convent that was being sold and turned into a hotel. The bodies kept in the crypt had to be unearthed and moved.
Among them were the Viceroy of Peru, a mysterious empty coffin for a marquis, and another coffin that when opened revealed the skeleton of a girl covered with long streams of copper hair. The foreman explained that human hair still grows after death, and at 22 meters, 11 centimeters, this hair appeared to have been growing for 200 years.
García Márquez then remembered a story his late grandmother told him about the daughter of a marquis “with hair that trailed behind her like a bridal train.” Legend had it that the girl died from a dog bite and was venerated in towns along the Carribean coast for the miracles she used to perform in her lifetime.
On the headstone, only her given name was legible – “Sierva Maria.” There was no way of knowing if this was the same girl in his grandmother’s story, but it would become the name and the story of the rebellious girl raised by her parents’ slaves in Of Love and Other Demons (my favorite book of García Márquez alongside One Hundred Years of Solitude).
The crypt.
After being bitten, Sierva Maria is sent to the Santa Clara Convent to be exorcised (a practice sanctioned by the Catholic Church until today). It is here that she and the priest, Father Cayetano, fall in love. When they are discovered, he is sent away to a leper colony and her long hair is cut off in punishment. She then dies “of love” from never seeing him again and is found in her cell while “strands of hair gushed like bubbles as they grew back on her shaved head.”
Santa Clara was built as a convent in 1621. It was converted to a hospital then a hotel.
Today, inside Hotel Santa Clara, the confessionals, the archways over the cloisters, and the central well the nuns once used for purification are preserved in the same ecclesiastical details of the once-convent. So is the emptied crypt inside the hotel’s El Coro Lounge. Here you can see the stairway, encased in glass, leading below.
The arches and confessionals in the inner courtyard are beautifully preserved.
A confessional.
One of my favorite parts in the book happens in the beginning. As Sierva Maria’s father is playing music, she asks him whether it is true that love conquers all, as the song says. “It is true,” he replies, “but you would do well not to believe it.”
Present-day as a Sofitel.
