Word: townes
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...gasp, aghast when I told her I planned to spend my postelection holiday in Cartagena, Colombia. In fact, few of my friends seemed to think it was a good idea: I couldn't persuade any of them to share my rental house in the city's walled Old Town. If they had heard of Cartagena at all, it was only as the backdrop of the classic 1980s romantic caper Romancing the Stone, a place of corrupt juntas and bodice-ripper-reading drug dealers - a parody turned deadly serious by four decades of civil war, Pablo Escobar and cocaine cartels...
...faced cabdriver, looking as if he had just stepped off the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, speaks of his 18 children and 30 grandchildren, many named some iteration of José. Characters like these aren't hard to find in Cartagena. And the cobblestone, bougainvillea-draped Old Town, with its bright colors, 18th century mansions and roving salsa bands, is like a spiffed-up fusion of New Orleans and Havana. (See the 100 best novels of all time...
...Cartagena's Old Town was once ransomed to the Spanish crown for 2 million gold pieces by Sir Francis Drake, and it was for centuries Spain's vault for its vast South American holdings. The city earned the nickname La Heroica, having endured hundreds of sieges throughout the 17th and 18th centuries - as evidenced by the 400-year-old walls, made of mined coral, that encircle the city. But for all of Cartagena's battlements, in the modern era it has been plagued by crime, its potential as a UNESCO World Heritage site marred by kidnappings and murders. (See pictures...
...upon his election, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe made it a priority to secure Cartagena's walls. Emulating London, Uribe installed a 137-camera surveillance system that covers all of the Old Town and tourist areas. Murders dropped from 66 in 2002 to just 23 last year, 10 fewer than in my hometown of Washington. Uribe then lobbied Washington to declare the city safe for U.S. travel, a designation that opened the floodgates to cruise ships. In the past five years, foreign visitors to Colombia have more than doubled, from 1 million to 2.6 million a year. From...
...even expat Colombians are going home to get in on the action," says Chantal McLaughlin, an editor for Suzanne's Files, a travel, dining and lifestyle website. "A host of new upscale boutique hotels and restaurants have opened there recently, and more are under construction, many in renovated historic town houses...