Colombia is a Spanish-speaking country in South America with two coasts, one on the Pacific and one on the Caribbean. Its whole north coast is Caribbean, and it has been Caribbean for as long as any place on the mainland.
Cartagena is the heart of it. The Spanish founded the walled port in 1533, and for almost three centuries it was their main treasure city on the Caribbean, the same role Portobelo held in Panama. The old city still stands behind its sea walls, and it holds the largest Spanish fortifications in South America.
Barranquilla is the biggest city on the coast. It is the home of the Carnival of Barranquilla, which UNESCO lists as a masterpiece of world heritage. The carnival mixes African, Indigenous, and European tradition into one of the great festivals of the Americas.
Santa Marta, founded in 1525, is the oldest surviving city in Colombia. Behind it, mountains rise straight from the Caribbean shore, high enough to see from far out at sea.
The coast has its own sound. Cumbia and champeta were born here, Afro-Caribbean music that spread from the coast across the whole country. The people of the coast are the costeños, Afro-Caribbean in roots and Caribbean in daily life.
Colombia's north coast is Caribbean from end to end. It shares the sea, the islands, the African heritage, and the colonial history of the rest of this shore.
Video about Caribbean Colombia
Colombia's Caribbean islands
Colombia's most surprising Caribbean land is not on its coast at all. Far out to sea, closer to Nicaragua than to Colombia, lie the islands of San Andrés and Providencia. They sit about 750 km from the mainland, and they feel like a different country.
- San Andrés — the largest island in Colombia. A coral island with white beaches, and the main gateway to the archipelago.
- Providencia — smaller and quieter, the heart of the islands' old culture, ringed by one of the largest coral reefs in the Americas.
- The Rosario Islands — a group of more than twenty small coral islands just off Cartagena, a national park of reefs and clear water.
The people of San Andrés and Providencia are the Raizal. They are Afro-Caribbean and Protestant, descended from enslaved Africans and Jamaican settlers, and they speak an English-based Creole. It is the same culture, and almost the same language, as Bluefields in Nicaragua, Limón in Costa Rica, and Bocas del Toro and Colón in Panama. The Caribbean reaches across the whole sea, and these islands are where Colombia meets that wider Caribbean world.
