Cartagena . . . in the footsteps of Gabriel García Márquez

It is pronounced Cartahena and this lovely 16th century coastal city in Colombia is as closely associated with Nobel prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez as Joyce is with Dublin. Marquez memorably portrayed it as a place of “amethyst afternoons and nights of antic breezes”, though arriving on a delayed flight from Bogota in a violent thunderstorm, it seemed more like a place of downpours and antic floods, never mind jewelled afternoons.