Cartagena, Colombia

Cartengena is a major city and has developed over many years since its founding in 1533 to be a major international hub. There are tall buildings, sky scrapers, shopping centres, motorways and major overpasses throughout the metropolis.

I was due to sleep in the centre of the old city which is all low rise and narrow streets. There are some great institutional buildings such as the theatre.

And there are plenty of other beautiful buildings.

But there are still plenty of building that would need money to restore them to their original grandeur and this particular project was already more than half way through but it still looked a long way from fruition.

And disappointingly there were plenty of back streets where there had been beautiful buildings that were crumbling into potential empty plots or car parks if no one took any action to preserve them.

The min entrance to the old walls city is a clock tower which was also the starting point of my city tour.

And a picture of the bus that would be taking me around the city. And due to the one way system in the older part of town, which mens that you always have to go at least thee sides of a square to get anywhere.

We had a long run out of the old city along a city beach...mostly I am sure just in order to go to some other hotels and pick up other guests for the tour before going through the harbour area back to the old town.

Pelicans sitting on a breakwater on one of the beaches.

The beaches were clean and sandy and seemingly so numerous that they seemed empty.

Then we stopped at one of the outer defences built to defend the harbour after the English attacked in 1741 during The War of Jenkins Ear 1739 - 1748.

 Then we went to see an iconic symbol of the city...a large pair of shoes. A reference to a line in a poem by Cartagena's famous poet, Luis Carlos Lopez.

 And then it was on to the highlight of the tour as far as I was concerned, the main castle which was besieged by the English in 1741.

 And a giant flag, the yellow symbolising the ground, blue the sea and the red the blood of patriots...which seems very similar the the story I heard about the Venezuelan flag! And why yellow for the ground?...green is more associated with jungle, and the colour of earth, brown is not an attractive colour and no one has brown on a flag so it was yellow.

 Another tourist bus, a converted tramcar seen from the castle battlements.

 A beautiful building but now a series of tourist souvenir shops.

 The Herida Theatre.

 And lastly the cathedral, a beautiful building but shut to visitors for renovations although the tower looked great, the main body of the building still needed attention.