Sleeping in a convent: boutique hotels in Cartagena's Old City

On the far side of a heavy wooden door, the city goes quiet. The clatter of carriages and the calls of street vendors stay outside, and within there is only a shaded cloister, the drip of a fountain and the smell of damp earth in the garden. The best thing about staying in Cartagena's Old City is that everything is walkable: dinner, morning coffee and the stroll home in the small hours over stone streets. And many of its hotels weren't built as hotels: they were convents, palaces and family homes long before they welcomed guests. These are some of our favourites, all a few blocks from Casa Salvaje.

A city of cloisters

From the moment Pedro de Heredia founded it in 1533, Cartagena was as devout as it was rich. While the walls went up to keep out pirates like Francis Drake, who sacked the city in 1586, the religious orders filled it with convents: the Franciscans in San Diego, the Poor Clares at Santa Clara, the Carmelites at Santa Teresa. Each was a small walled world of its own, with an orchard, a cistern and its share of secrets.

After independence those cloisters changed lives several times over, becoming prisons, hospitals and schools. Today some of them are hotels, where 17th-century stone shares the scene with rooftop pools. Few cities let you sleep, quite literally, inside their own history.

Which is why these hotels aren't chosen for their rooms alone. They're chosen for what happened within their walls, and in Cartagena something always did.

These hotels aren't chosen for their rooms, but for what happened within their walls.

I · Morning

The archbishop's silence

Casa del Arzobispado

A small boutique hotel steps from the Cathedral, in a colonial house that was once the archbishop's residence. Few rooms, a very quiet atmosphere and the feeling of having the old city to yourself.

It sits on the street that bears its name, Calle del Arzobispado, across from the Cathedral of Santa Catalina. Inside, the house hasn't forgotten its religious past: sacred paintings still hang on its walls, as if the former residents had never quite moved out.

Best for calm in the middle of town, with dinner within walking distance.

II · Afternoon

Two convents

Sofitel Legend Santa Clara

The former convent of the Poor Clares, dating from the 17th century, is one of the most storied buildings in Cartagena. After the nuns it served as a hospital, a jail and a medical school, until it opened as a hotel in 1995. The cloister and its gardens survive, and one step through the gate explains why it's a city classic.

The convent was completed in 1621. More than three centuries later, in 1949, a young reporter named Gabriel García Márquez was sent to cover the emptying of its crypts, and watched a cascade of copper-coloured hair more than twenty-two metres long spill from one of the tombs. From that image came Of Love and Other Demons, the story of Sierva María, locked away in this very convent. The crypt is still there, in the middle of the El Coro bar, protected by a pane of glass.

Don't miss the crypt, behind the glass in the El Coro bar.

Charleston Santa Teresa

On Plaza de Santa Teresa, which gives our street its name, this hotel occupies another former convent: that of the Carmelite nuns. It pairs a colonial wing with a republican one and has a rooftop pool looking over the tiled roofs and the city walls. From its door to ours is a very short walk.

The colonial wing was built in the 17th century for the Carmelites, and once the nuns had gone the building lived several lives: a prison, a girls' school and a police station, until a major restoration in the 1980s turned it into a hotel. In a way, it is Casa Salvaje's oldest neighbour.

Don't miss the rooftop pool, with the city walls as a backdrop.

III · At the table

Classics to eat nearby

Plaza de San Diego takes its name from the Franciscan convent that stood there from 1608 to 1821. It went on to be a naval school, then a prison until 1968 and, for a few years, a psychiatric hospital, before becoming the School of Fine Arts. Today, where prisoners once paced, you hear music rehearsals and catch the smell of fresh paint.

La Vitrola

A colonial house facing the city walls and a Cartagena institution, with live Cuban music in the evenings.

Juan del Mar

Seafood in a colonial house on Plaza de San Diego, one of the liveliest corners of the Old City.

Ely Café

For brunch: its Bocagrande location, a few minutes from the walled city, is a favourite way to start the day.

Epilogue

A one-day plan

Brunch, a walk along the walls as the sun goes down, a drink on the hotel rooftop and, for the night, fire at Kanibal or the feast at SLVJ. Thursday to Saturday the club runs until 3 am, and your hotel is a few blocks away.

Along the way, it's worth a detour down Calle de la Factoría. In the corner house at Carrera Segunda, the painter Alejandro Obregón lived from 1968 until his death in 1992: the artist of condors and barracudas, who chose this city to paint in. Cartagena has always been like that, a city artists choose and then can't bring themselves to leave.