From afar, Cartagena’s skyline is deceptive. Its white towers rise above the Caribbean from a peninsula of tan sand and concrete, making it look like a bigger, beachier metropolis than it is. But with fewer than a million people, Cartagena is a sliver of the size of Rio de Janeiro or Los Angeles. One might expect the crisp new skyscrapers in Bocagrande to be in the midst of a vital, cosmopolitan downtown.

Instead, Cartagena’s character — its lush plazas, fruit vendors and street art — is contained in two small, impossibly photogenic neighborhoods: the walled Old City and the rising barrio Getsemaní. There, in the birthplace of Gabriel García Márquez’s magical realism, are the city’s most refined restaurants, its museums and balconies that spill over with flowering bougainvillea. But even in its most energetic quarters, Cartagena is not so much a place to do, as a place to be.