Plaza de San Diego - Convents and a Novelist's Ghost Story
Photo: Joe Ross from Lansing, Michigan, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped)
A stop on Cartagena Walled City Walk, a free self-guided tour.
You have walked into San Diego, the quieter, more residential corner of the walled city, and its small plaza is ringed by restaurants and cafes. Two old convents shape this area. One, on the plaza itself, now houses the city's fine arts school. The other, the convent of Santa Clara, just around the corner, is now a luxury hotel.
The Santa Clara convent inspired one of Colombia's most famous writers. In 1949 Gabriel Garcia Marquez, then a young reporter, watched workers empty the convent's old crypt. Among the remains, he later wrote, was the skull of a girl with an astonishingly long mane of copper-colored hair. Decades later, that memory grew into his novel Of Love and Other Demons, published in 1994.
Garcia Marquez lived in Cartagena for long stretches, and the city's streets, balconies and heat run all through his books.
If you are walking in the evening, this plaza is a good place to come back for dinner. By day, just enjoy the calm.
Getting here: From the cathedral, walk north-east through the old town along Calle Santo Domingo and Calle del Colegio, following the map to Plaza de San Diego, about 8 minutes.
Did you know?: Garcia Marquez dated his visit to the Santa Clara crypt to October 26, 1949, when he was a 22-year-old newspaper reporter.
Photo op: Frame the plaza's colorful colonial facades and bougainvillea-draped balconies from one corner of the square.
More on Wikipedia: Gabriel Garcia Marquez · Of Love and Other Demons · Poor Clares
Stops on this tour
- Torre del Reloj - The Clock Tower Gate
- Getsemani and Plaza de la Trinidad - Where Independence Began
- Plaza de los Coches - A Market of Human Lives
- Plaza de la Aduana - Customs, Columbus and City Hall
- Church of San Pedro Claver - Servant of the Enslaved
- Las Murallas - Walking the City Walls
- Plaza Santo Domingo - Legends and a Botero
- Palace of the Inquisition - Fear Behind a Fine Doorway
- Cathedral and Plaza de Bolivar - Shade, Stone and Gold
- Plaza de San Diego - Convents and a Novelist's Ghost Story
- Las Bovedas - Vaults in the Wall
- Church of Santo Toribio - The Cannonball at Mass