Colombia: Cartagena, Medellín and the Coffee Country

There's a salsa rhythm that follows you around Colombia, leaking out of corner shops and passing taxis, and after a few days you stop fighting it and just let your shoulders move. That, more than any landmark, is what I brought home. I came expecting a country defined by an old, tired story; I left thinking about a place busy writing a new one, loudly, in colour, with the music turned up.

I landed in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast, where the heat hits you like a held breath and the old walled town glows ochre and rose at dusk. This is the Colombia of postcards — UNESCO-listed ramparts, horse carriages, bougainvillea spilling over wooden balconies — and for once the postcard undersells it. I walked the city walls at sunset with an arepa in hand and felt the whole place exhale.

Cartagena, behind the walls

The fortified old town is the obvious star, but I lost most of my heart one neighbourhood over, in Getsemaní. Streets strung with paper flags and umbrellas overhead, murals down every alley, kids playing football against four hundred years of stone. By day it's languid; after dark it hums. I sorted my data the moment I landed — I'd installed an eSIM before the flight, so the phone was online at the airport, and within minutes I'd called a ride, pinned my guesthouse and translated a menu I couldn't read. In the city, 4G is genuinely good.

« Colombia didn't ask me to be brave. It asked me to put down a story I'd been told and look again. »

Here's the honest bit this blog runs on: that strong signal is a city thing. When I day-tripped out to Tayrona, where jungle tips straight into Caribbean sand, the bars thinned out fast and then vanished under the canopy — which is exactly how it should be. I downloaded an offline map, screenshotted the trail and the bus times, and treated a couple of hours off-grid as part of the deal, not a problem to fix.

Medellín, the city that changed its story

Then I flew inland to Medellín, the "city of eternal spring," and it's the climate you notice first — that improbable, year-round mildness in a valley ringed by green. But what stayed with me was the transformation. For a long time this city carried a heavy reputation; what you see now is a place that chose mobility and dignity over that past. In Comuna 13, a hillside barrio once cut off from the centre, outdoor escalators and a cable-car line stitched the neighbourhood back into the city. Today its staircases are a gallery of murals, with guides from the community telling their own version of events — not the version sold by old films. I rode the metrocable up over the rooftops, watched the valley tilt away beneath the gondola, and understood the pride locals take in a public transport system that means so much more than transport. One day I escaped east to Guatapé, where a vast granite monolith called El Peñol rises out of a maze of green islands; you climb a zigzag of more than seven hundred steps bolted to its flank for a view that empties your lungs, and the town below is a riot of painted bas-relief façades, every house wearing its own colour.

The coffee country, where the road exhales

I saved the Eje Cafetero, the coffee region, for last, basing myself in Salento — a small town of brightly painted shopfronts that feels purpose-built for slowing down. Just outside it lies the Cocora valley, where the wax palms, the tallest palms in the world and Colombia's national tree, rise out of green hills in the morning mist like something a child drew before learning the rules. You walk among them and it genuinely doesn't feel real. A coffee-farm tour the next morning, a willys jeep rattling up a finca track, a tinto pressed into my hands by a grower who'd done this all his life: this was the Colombia that slows your pulse. This is also where you make peace with coverage that comes and goes — the valley and its finca roads are properly rural, and out toward the wilder corners of the country, like the Amazon basin or the seasonal rainbow river of Caño Cristales (which only shows its colours roughly June to November), connectivity gets genuinely patchy. I let the green hush of the hills be exactly that.

What I take away

Three weeks, and a country that refuses to be the cliché it inherited: Caribbean Cartagena behind its walls, Medellín reinventing itself one cable-car at a time, the giant palms of Cocora, a tinto in Salento with the salsa still playing somewhere down the street. Good signal where the cities are, honest gaps where the wild begins, and a thread back home for the moments worth sharing. Come with respect, an open mind, and let your shoulders move.

— Romain, salsa in my ears, somewhere between a wall and a wax palm.