What New Year in Cartagena is actually like
It is the busiest week of the city's year, and it is good weather. New Year sits at the front of the December to April dry season, which means warm days and the clearest light of the year, and it also means the Walled City is full, rates are at their annual peak, and flights from Bogotá are expensive well before Christmas.
We will not pretend to publish the city's party listings. What the street does on the night of 31 December changes year to year, and any page that tells you otherwise is guessing. What we can give you is the part of the calendar that does not move, and an honest account of how the week works from out here.
The fixed points in the holiday calendar
Reyes, 6 January. The Epiphany holiday closes the season, and the days around it are the hardest of the whole year to find a bed in Cartagena. Plenty of Colombian visitors stay through to it rather than leaving on the 2nd, which is why the peak runs a week longer than foreign visitors expect.
Cartagena Festival de Música, the first two weeks of January. This is the reason to stay on past New Year rather than fly out. Around twenty-seven classical concerts, the Teatro Adolfo Mejía as the main room, with other performances in the Sofitel Legend Santa Clara chapel and the auditorium of the Palacio de la Proclamación. Tickets go through Tuboleta. If you care about the programme, look at it in November rather than on arrival.
Hay Festival, late January. Not a New Year event, but worth knowing if you are extending. The literature and ideas festival takes over venues in the Walled City including the Claustro de la Merced, sessions cost around USD 15, and the main sessions run with simultaneous Spanish and English translation.
Why December is a good month on the water
The dry season changes the bay more than it changes the city. December mornings are usually flat and clear, which is the condition we want for the two things worth getting up early for here: a kayak into the Barú mangroves, and the birds that come with dawn rather than mid-morning.
It also makes the crossing easy. Our boat takes 30 minutes to an hour from Cartagena, and in dry-season weather that is a pleasant ride rather than a wet one. Reserve it with your room. Capacity is limited, and if you turn up for the holiday week unreserved and there is no space, the wait for the next crossing is long.
Spending the week out here instead
We have six rooms across three houses, and that is the whole property. Villa Orquidea holds the Estrella, Cuerno and Fuego rooms. Casita Veranera holds Rhizo and Avi, both with a balcony over the Ciénaga de Cholón. Casita Laguna stands apart, with its own pool, an outdoor bathroom and a gazebo. Villa Pinto is the three-bedroom house designed by Simón Vélez and Gustavo Pinto, in guadua bamboo, sleeping up to eight.
For a group that wants the holiday to itself, the whole place can be taken as a villa. Families often split it the obvious way: one household in Villa Orquidea, the other in Casita Veranera or Casita Laguna, which keeps two groups under separate roofs without putting them on separate islands.
One warning about the season, since it is the practical difference between the city and here: we are not connected to public utilities, which is what our resort fee of USD 20 per night covers. Foreign residents pay no tax on hotel accommodation, and for Colombian residents IVA is already included.
If you want a day in the Walled City
Go in and come back. The city is an hour or less away by boat, so the holiday week can be structured as quiet days on the bay with one or two evenings in town, rather than a choice between the two. That is the argument for being out here over New Year and it is the only one we would make: you get the concerts and the streets when you want them, and a bay that empties at dusk when you do not.
If a village rather than a city is what you are after, Bocachica is on the way. No running water and no paved roads, and no chic restaurants either. It is island life as it is actually lived, and it will stay with you longer than the fireworks.
Booking in practice
Decide by October. Between Reyes, the music festival and the dry weather, the first week of January books out earlier here than any other week of the year, and six rooms do not stretch. From Rafael Núñez International Airport to our door is about an hour and we can arrange transfers both ways; leaving, give yourself three hours before departure.