If you close your eyes, Cartagena de Indias it can be heard. Music breathes every pore of this city and roams freely between alleys and squares in which they coexist colonial churches with sculptures by Botero. Maybe not only hear, maybe also feel.
If you close your eyes, Cartagena can be heard.
Today I want to talk to you about soul. Of the salsa nights , of heat, of warm hearts. Cartagena de Indias It's in a corner of the caribbean atlantic and it seems that it shelters itself from time and the passage of life, as if behind the clock tower hid a world in which Gabriel García Márquez continued walking his characters, as if Florentino Ariza I could step on those cobblestones madly loving Fermina Daza.
As if the only thing that hurt them about dying is that It wasn't love. As if it had really happened.
The rhythm in every corner , the traditional or the rhymes that sound like rap, the restaurants boisterous (there is not one without hustle, don't try), couples who love each other in front of us in the Baruco , the friends who celebrate, the hands that hold each other, the brandy in bottles , the art of enjoying at any time.
walk through their colorful streets it's almost doing it for a painting if it weren't for the smiles you come across, which remind you that yes, it is as real as your will to live behind those doors.
Vines climb seeking better views , the balconies look impeccable waiting for the photographs of the curious, the terraces receive the rest of the visitors always with a hat (impossible to resist buying one of the stalls on the street) and the walls are as chaotic as they are perfectly arranged. Pink, Blue, Coral, Green, Yellow, Orange. Fruits, coconut water, shouting, revelry. Everything happens outside.
Vines climb looking for better views.
The horse carts drive suggestively to the Coffee of the Sea, where the impatient sunset does not wait , and melts between toasts of the lucky ones who observe it. When the night takes over the sky, the Getsemaní neighborhood is pure party.
The Trinity Square becomes a meeting point between streets full of graffiti that speak of life, silences and loves that were, places to dine and colonial houses transformed into Hotels that seem to have a jungle inside.
Cartagena walls.
Artists hang their paintings on the walls and it keeps smelling like paint because if you're an artist, you never stop being one. Salsa is danced in the havanaclub, on the gathering and at a crossroads if you have a loudspeaker.
Is it possible that there is a place where always summer? Before leaving, I read, on a painted wall, a phrase attributed to Frida Kahlo: "Where you cannot love, do not delay". What if you find just the opposite? love. Stay. Always stay.