Santa Cruz de Mompox, Colombia - Sixteenth-century Santa Cruz de Mompox, a five-hour drive inland from Colombia's historic port city of Cartagena, is a town in a doze. In swampy territory, on an island between two arms of the Rio Magdalena, it's a little bit of Seville that got lost and then marooned both by silt and by political upheaval.
The Magdalena is Colombia's principal river and was once the route by which gold and silver from Ecuadorian mines was shipped to Cartagena for transfer to convoys crossing the Atlantic to Cádiz. Mompox (also shown on maps as "Mompós") grew up to service this river traffic, and the wealth it produced paid for the construction of vast courtyard mansions and imposing churches that now seem entirely out of place in such a backwater, where the horse cart is still an important part of local transportation.
A line of them waits in the shade beneath trees on the riverbank, across the square from Mompox's most magnificent monument, the orange-sorbet-coloured Santa Barbara church. Its recently restored tower is an octagonal wedding cake, trimmed in white, incorporating faintly Egyptian pillars, and with large bells in each of eight niches. The trip through verdant scenery from Cartagena, typically in a shared pick-up that boards an antique car ferry, would be worth it just for this.
When the river silted up in the late 19th century waterborne trade came to an end, the population dropped and Mompox fell asleep. Until recently drug cartels and insurgency made the 385-kilometre journey from Cartagena a little risky.
Inscription on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 1995 brought Mompox to the world's attention just as the region was becoming safe for travel. But still the only sign of tourism is the conversion of a small number of ancient houses into boutique accommodation, whose hoteliers still dream of a rush to come.
Best-known is La Casa Amarilla, a quiet and comfortably modernized 17th-century mansion with rooftop views across the island, which neighbours Santa Barbara. Its fame is partly due to the untiring efforts of its Anglo-Canadian journalist owner, Richard McColl, to build the town's reputation.
Happily, the grid of narrow streets contains bakeries and groceries rather than souvenir shops or pestering guides.
Ordinary life goes on behind the ornate iron grilles of the whitewashed houses. Dark entrances offer glimpses of sunlit courtyard gardens, drenched with bougainvillea. Another five plump churches and the cultural museum echo to your footsteps, and in small workshops craftsmen making the filigree gold and silver jewelry for which the town is famous, tap on largely unobserved. Take a boat out on the river and your company is innumerable kingfishers and herons, with large and lazy iguanas observing from the banks.
The 2014 death of Latin American literary superstar Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez brought the town to public notice again. The novelist lived elsewhere on the river, but mentions its dream-like quality in The General in His Labyrinth, and it is where Chronicle of a Death Foretold was filmed. For Mompox is the last undisturbed survivor of colonial Colombia.
If you go: For more information on Mompox visit off2colombia.com/colombia-regions/the-caribbean-coast/mompox. For information on travel in Colombia visit the Government of Colombia website at colombia.travel.
- More stories at culturelocker.com
