his efforts to end 52 years of war in the country. Untouched by the conflict, Cartagena, on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, has long inspired visitors and writers—in particular, novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who set his luminous Love in the Time of Cholera here. See what inspired him on a stroll through the walled Old City with its brightly painted colonial mansions, bougainvillea-draped balconies, and open-air courtyard cafés filled with the infectious rhythms of cumbia. Márquez told the Paris Review in 1981 that while he garners credit for his fiction, his work is entirely drawn from real life: “The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.” —MKD
