Meet Caribbean Colombia

Say Colombia and watch what happens to people’s faces. There is still a flicker, just for a moment, of the old story. It’s not an unfair association; Colombia’s history is complicated and its wounds are recent. But the Caribbean coast has been steadily becoming one of the most extraordinary places to travel in the Americas. And most people still don’t know.

National Geographic once wrote that if Earth’s biodiversity were a country, it could be called Colombia. Almost 9,000 endemic species. More birds and orchids than Attenborough could shake a stick at (though, he’s more of a gentle-gesture-towards-it type). More than anywhere else on the planet, in fact. More species of everything, frankly, than feels entirely reasonable.

The Caribbean coast brings its own kind of abundance. Over just a few hundred miles you have Spanish colonial architecture, the towering Sierra Nevada mountains, white sand beaches, rivers, arid desert and biodiverse marshland. It is, in the best possible way, a lot.

Colombia’s reputation simply hasn’t caught up with reality. For a lot of people, it still hasn’t. Which, for now, is kind of the point.

Caribbean Colombia: a different world entirely

Colombia covers a lot of ground. The Andes, the Amazon, the coffee region, the Pacific coast. It is one of the most geographically diverse countries on earth. But the Caribbean coast is its own world entirely. Slower, warmer, more colourful in every sense of the word. The temperature stays high all year, and when I say high, I mean it. Don’t plan on doing much between noon and three. The music drifts from open doorways. The pace of life here is set not by clocks but by the heat, the tide, the cumbia rhythms that were born on this coast centuries ago. And, it should be said, some of the best coffee on earth (obviously). Colombia has its priorities right.

This is the Colombia of Gabriel García Márquez, who grew up along this Caribbean shoreline and whose magical realism wasn’t a literary device so much as an accurate description of daily life here. Colour, warmth, abundance, the feeling that anything might happen. It is all present, and you feel it almost immediately.

The wider Caribbean coast has a lot going on. Tayrona National Park is the one everyone’s heard of, and honestly, the hype is justified. Rainforest dropping almost vertically down to Caribbean beaches, howler monkeys in the canopy, indigenous Kogi communities whose sacred sites predate the Spanish by centuries. It has also, inevitably, got very busy. Go on a weekday. Go early. Or skip it entirely and head to Palomino instead, where a river meets the sea and the whole place moves at its own unhurried pace. Minca is another one worth knowing about. A tiny village in the Sierra Nevada foothills where the birdwatching is frankly ridiculous. Hummingbirds, toucans, hundreds of species. You go for a walk and come back having seen more birds than you knew existed.

The Colombian Caribbean coast stretches for hundreds of kilometres, taking in rainforest, mountains, golden beaches and the kind of small fishing towns that exist entirely at their own pace. At its heart sits Cartagena, one of the most captivating cities in the Americas, and just offshore, a scattering of islands that exist purely to make you more horizontal.

Isla Tierra Bomba

Twenty minutes by boat from Cartagena (from the Castillogrande port to be exact) and Tierra Bomba has its own entirely different idea of what a day should look like. Close enough to feel connected, far enough to feel like another world. You feel it the moment you step off the lancha. The air is saltier. The pace drops immediately. There is something about islands that does this. Removes the noise. Gives you back to yourself. The crossing sits within the bay of Cartagena, which keeps things calm even when the afternoon seas get rough further out.

Not your typical Caribbean island

This isn’t the white-sand, turquoise-water Caribbean of holiday brochures. What Tierra Bomba has is something the brochure islands don’t: a sense of genuine place. Around 8,000 people live here across four small communities, their relationship with this bay running back generations. The island’s southern tip, where the sea is calmer and the air feels further from everything, is where it gets really good.

A community with roots

Most of the island’s inhabitants are descendants of enslaved Africans brought here from the sixteenth century. Unlike on any other of Cartagena’s islands, residents here have no legal ownership of the land they live on: a legacy of those same colonial power structures that shaped everything else along this coast. It’s a complicated history, and it is still very much alive.

What has grown here in spite of that, and in some ways because of it, is a community with serious resourcefulness. The beach club where we stay runs a glass recycling initiative that collects used bottles from bars and restaurants across Cartagena, processes them on the island, and employs local women to turn them into glassware. Those glasses on the tables at Carmen and Celele? Made here, on Tierra Bomba, by people from this community.

The island’s history runs deep. Cartagena’s wealth made it a constant target for pirates, and the Spanish built elaborate fortifications on either side of the narrow Bocachica passage to protect the bay. The Fuerte de San Fernando de Bocachica still stands at the island’s southern tip, moss-covered, enormous, and almost completely overlooked by the outside world. Cross the island by motorbike taxi to the village of Bocachica and you find a quieter, more local side of island life: fishing boats, kids on bicycles, the unhurried rhythms of a community that tourism hasn’t quite reached yet. The moto-tour to Bocachica is one of those things you’ll be glad you did. The old fortress, the village streets, life moving at its own pace on the other side of the island.

A B Corp Beach Club

A solar-powered B Corp beach club sits on the island’s long southern beach, the kind of place that looks like it grew there naturally. After dark, with Cartagena’s glow just visible on the horizon, you can swim alone in a warm Caribbean ocean and feel a long way from anywhere. The bonds of wherever you came from start to loosen. Mornings here have a particular quality. The light comes early and the sea is already warm. The day starts gently and then opens up.

The beach club here was founded by Portia, a British-Trinidadian entrepreneur who arrived on Tierra Bomba and ended up leading the regeneration of an island community. Boutique without being fussy. High on comfort, low on hierarchy. The kind of place where staff and guests exist on equal footing. “We’re all humans, after all.” Her words, and very much the spirit of the place.

The rhythm of days here moves in unexpected directions. Yoga gives way to scuba tanks. Breathwork to horse saddles. A motorbike to Bocachica village, a boat speeding out to the Rosario Islands with a picnic waiting somewhere along the way. The honest truth, though, is that doing nothing here is a completely legitimate way to spend a day. The hammock is not a last resort.

Get in the sea

The house reef just offshore is where things get properly special. For those who want to go deeper, the beach club runs as a certified dive centre with access to a handful of sites in the nearby Rosario Islands: coral reefs, shipwrecks, even an underwater sculpture gallery. The house reef is also home to an active reef restoration project, which you can explore as you dive. The coral starts at depth, so scuba tends to reward more than snorkelling, but there are options for all levels. It’s also, for what it’s worth, completely addictive.

The Rosario Islands

A speedboat ride from Tierra Bomba brings you to the Rosario Islands. Twenty-eight white-sand islets scattered across a protected national park, surrounded by water so clear and calm it barely seems real. Spend a day hopping between them, swimming, snorkelling, eating fresh fish somewhere along the way. There are shipwrecks to explore and, one of those details that sounds made up until you’re actually there, an underwater sculpture gallery on the seabed. Life-sized figures, coral slowly claiming them. You will not want to leave. This is a warning.

On land

Horse riding along the deserted beaches and forest trails of Tierra Bomba has a particular magic. The Paso Fino breed, brought to Colombia by Spanish conquistadors in the 15th century and selectively bred here for centuries, moves with a smooth four-beat gait that makes even a long beach ride feel effortless. Swimming with the horses afterwards is, it should be said, absolutely as good as it sounds.

Cartagena

Then there is Cartagena herself. One of the earliest Spanish colonial cities in South America, and one of those places that has a habit of keeping people longer than they planned. People come for a week and stay a month. Some never quite leave. It is that kind of city.

A city that holds its history closely

The place through which the wealth of an empire flowed, and through which, in the darkest chapter of this coast’s history, more than a million enslaved Africans arrived over three centuries. Cartagena was one of the largest ports for the trade of enslaved people in all of Latin America. That is not a footnote. It is the foundation of everything the city became.

That history is present everywhere in Cartagena, and it is very much alive. The Atlantic coast has one of the highest concentrations of Afro-Colombian people in the country, and nowhere is that presence more vividly expressed than in Cartagena. The African influence on this city’s food, music, faith and daily life is not a heritage attraction. It is simply the city, alive and continuing.

The Palenqueras have been walking these streets for centuries. Women from San Basilio de Palenque, the first free African settlement in the Americas, selling coconut sweets to recipes that haven’t changed in 400 years. They are not a tourist attraction. They are a living thread of something that survived.

Streets worth getting lost in

The walled city is UNESCO listed, and once you’re in it you’ll understand immediately why. Cobblestone streets, colonial churches, bougainvillea spilling from every balcony. Get up early and wander Getsemaní in the quiet dawn: the graffiti murals, the elaborate wooden doorways, the streets before the heat arrives and before anyone else is out. Salsa music spills from doorways in the evening and hangs in the warm air, the ghost of Joe Arroyo, Cartagena’s most beloved son, in every bar that plays it. Corn-loaded carts criss-cross between people. A man gets a haircut in a plastic chair on the pavement. The neighbourhood has a way of pulling you in and keeping you there later than you planned.

Eat everything

The food is worth the trip alone. Street vendors sell plastic cups of juice squeezed from fruits you can’t quite name. The smell of frying plantain drifts from corners. Cartagena’s cuisine is a direct expression of its history: African technique, Caribbean ingredients, Spanish influence, arriving on the plate as something entirely its own. Coconut rice, fried mojarra, arepas de huevo, fresh ceviche eaten standing up. Order something. Then order it again.

Once a backpacker haven, Cartagena has come into its own. The boutique hotels and rooftop bars have arrived. And the restaurant scene has become seriously world-class, chefs taking hyper-local ancestral ingredients and doing genuinely boundary-pushing things with them. Take Carmen, tucked into a courtyard built around a centuries-old fortress wall, with local musicians playing just quietly enough to not interrupt your dinner. Or Celele, hidden in Getsemaní, doing something glorious with Caribbean Colombian ingredients that puts it firmly on any serious foodie’s bucket list (don’t google it on an empty stomach). This is the kind of dining you’d expect to find in cities twice the size.

Fair warning

Colombia’s Caribbean coast tends to surprise people. Not with its history or its landscapes or even its food, though all of those will get you too. It’s something harder to name. A joy. A vibrancy that seems to run through the place like a current. You feel it in the people, in the colour of everything, in the way the islands, the cobblestones, the cumbia and the coast all somehow add up to more than the sum of their parts.

Most people leave already planning when to come back. That’s probably the most honest thing you can say about it.

We run a retreat along this stretch of coast each March. Island life, Cartagena, and yoga with James Rafael. If it’s been calling you, you probably already know. Find out more here.