How long it takes, door to door
About one hour, airport to our door. That figure covers both halves of the journey: the road transfer from Rafael Núñez International Airport (CTG) through Cartagena, and then the water crossing to us at Bahía de Cholón, which runs 30 minutes to an hour on our boat depending on conditions.
We can arrange that transfer in both directions. It isn't automatic, so please contact us with your flight details rather than assuming a seat is held.
The first half: out of CTG
Rafael Núñez International is the airport you want, and it sits inside the city rather than out in the countryside, which is why the whole journey is measured in an hour rather than half a day. You clear the terminal, you meet the road transfer, and you are taken to the water.
There is nothing you need to solve in the arrivals hall. If you have asked us to arrange the transfer, the arrangement is already made. If you haven't, that is the thing to fix before you fly, not after you land.
The second half: the crossing
Yes, we have a boat, and the crossing from Cartagena takes 30 minutes to an hour. Barú is a peninsula on the south side of Cartagena's bay, often called an island, and the water route is the direct one.
We'd rather be plain about what this means for your day. The crossing is not a formality you can arrive late for and catch up on. It is a scheduled movement across open water with a fixed number of seats, and the sea decides the pace more than we do.
Reserve the boat. This is the one thing we ask twice
Reserve it. Our boat has limited capacity, and if you are not reserved and there is no space, it is a long wait until the next crossing. That is the whole reason we raise it before anything else.
It is always a good idea to reserve your stay in general, and it matters most for the boat. A room can be arranged around you. A seat on a boat that has already left cannot.
Going home: the three-hour rule
Leave us three hours before your flight departure time. Not three hours before check-in closes, and not three hours before you'd like to be at the gate. Three hours before the aircraft is scheduled to go.
Door to door is an hour, so the extra two hours are deliberate slack: the crossing, the drive, and the airport itself. Guests who compress this are gambling with a flight, and the sea is not a traffic jam you can talk your way out of.
If you're flying in from Europe
We can't advise on the cheapest routes, and we won't pretend otherwise. For convenience, we recommend Amsterdam to Cartagena with KLM, or London to Bogotá direct with Avianca, then Bogotá onward with Avianca. Once you have landed at CTG, the rest of the journey is the one described above.
There's a longer piece on the European routes and what the connections look like in practice, linked below.
What we'd tell you to do, in order
- Book the stay and tell us the dates.
- Send us your inbound and outbound flight numbers and times.
- Ask us to arrange the transfer both ways, and confirm the boat seat specifically.
- On the way out, plan to leave us three hours before departure.
That sequence is short because the journey is short. The failure we see is never the distance. It is an unreserved seat on the last practical crossing of the day.
One note on what this journey buys you
An hour from an international airport is unusual for somewhere you reach by boat. It's worth understanding that the water is the point rather than the obstacle. We are on Bahía de Cholón, inside the mangroves of Barú, and there is no version of arriving here that ends with a taxi at the door. If you want the detail on what the bay is actually like to stay on, that is a different page, and it's linked below.