Concluding our full day’s excursion while in Cartagena, Colombia as part of our 2023 Ruby Princess cruise, and following on from earlier visits to the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas and a walking tour of the Walled City which included some free time for exploration and the chance to be approached by a local who wanted to know if we wanted “coffee” (wink), we met up with the rest of our group of cruise ship passengers for the final guided portion of the day’s activities.
We started off with a short walk of no more than a hundred metres from where we’d all met up, heading more-or-less due south towards the Plaza de San Pedro Claver. Naturally, more of that gorgeous colonial architecture came into view and there were more signs of the huge downpours that had preceded our visit to Cartagena, which still hadn’t drained away in places, and which had been the cause of some of the traffic problems our bus had encountered earlier in the day.
The first place we visited was the Church of San Pedro Claver (sometimes called a cathedral, sometimes a sanctuary, but I’ll stick to church). The building itself was one that had been constructed prior to Sir Francis Drake (you can see his house in Cartagena in the previous post) turning up in 1586 and raining down destruction on the city where it suffered damage and needed to be rebuilt.
Its original name was supplanted by that of San Pedro Claver, a Jesuit priest who arrived in Cartagena in 1610 and concentrated heavily on tending to the newly-arrived African slaves with just a little bit of encouragement to ditch their beliefs and convert to Christianity thrown in for good measure. It’s claimed that he personally baptised over 300,000 slaves and worked hard to have them treated more humanely, but he also owned slaves and wasn’t above punishing them so, you know, not all good. He was, nevertheless, canonised in 1888 and is the patron saint of slaves.
We began with a visit to the church’s courtyard, a very pleasant, relatively cool spot given the general levels of heat and humidity in Cartagena.
Next we entered the church itself. It was a fairly minimalist building, not given over to gaudy decorations. If you look just below the altar in one of the photos below then you can see where the bones of San Pedro Claver are located.
With our short visit to the church complete we stepped back out into the plaza, admired the sculpture of San Pedro Claver by Colombian artist Enrique Grau, avoided the temptation of some fresh fruit or other items from some of the stallholders in the area, and headed off around the corner to the next couple of stops on this tour.
First up was a traditional dance and music performance featuring acrobatic dancing, some singing, and plenty of drumming. I won’t pretend that this sort of thing interests us because it generally doesn’t. None of that takes away from the dancers or musicians because they’re all very talented but it’s not the sort of thing that sits well with me in particular and it’s not easy to say why.
The traditional dancing and music only lasted about ten minutes and from there we headed through a small courtyard into the Naval Museum next door. There were some interesting items in there but it was a small museum and overall not a particularly good example of one. Indeed, when combined with the historical museum we’d visited earlier on our walk through the city I think I’d have to say that museums are an area of cultural awareness and tourism that perhaps need a little look into improving. We very much liked Cartagena, though.
And that brought our cruise excursion in Cartagena to an end. All that remained was a short walk to where the bus was waiting for us, a little bit of battling traffic that may or may not have still been affected by localised flooding, and a drive back to the port that was slow enough for me to consider taking a few photos from on the bus (not something I generally do).
The end of the excursion, yes, but not quite the end of activities in Cartagena. In the final post from this final port on our cruise we’ll arrive at the port and discover a park filled with tropical birds only viewable by cruise passengers, plus there’s a sunset sail away and another deck party to enjoy.