Talking about Gethsemane today is talking about a living, current, modern Cartagena. Its streets, flooded with color and music, have turned this neighborhood into one of the most important cultural centers on the continent.  For a long time, Getsemaní was seen as little more than a ghetto and was not on the radar of even the most enthusiastic Cartagena people. However, its inhabitants decided to bet on its revival, and for some two decades they have promoted it through art, cooking and dance, with such success that the magazine Forbes today catalogs Getsemaní as one of the 12 most cool the planet.  But what many people don't realize is that, as rich as their present, is their enormous past. To understand the current state of Gethsemane, one must first know the path and the struggles that the "Getsemanienses" have had to go through to make it the cultural district that it is today. Let us, then, review the history of this old neighborhood of Cartagena, the cradle of the independence of Colombia and the artistic epicenter of the Caribbean.  

The Stone Playpen 

In 1502, during one of his voyages through the Caribbean Sea, the expedition led by the Sevillian navigator Rodrigo de Bastidas reached a bay surrounded by mangrove islands where indigenous people from the Kalamari tribe lived. 31 years later, and thanks to the warmth and shallowness of its waters, the conquistador Pedro de Heredia chose this bay as the ideal site for the construction of a port and a fortress that would serve as a shelter for all travelers arriving from Spain to the southern New World. The fortress was named Cartagena, and its port quickly became one of the largest in the West Indies. 

The northern end of the bay was fenced off, thus forming what we know today as the Walled City. The highest spheres of the political, economic and religious hierarchy of the Crown and the Church inhabited its interior, while the lowest social groups settled outside the walls and on the islands near the current Historic Center of Cartagena.  

A neighborhood on the outskirts 

One of these islands was Gethsemane, to the east of the city. A large population of converted Indians, serfdom slaves, and Spanish and Creole families, mainly merchants and artisans, settled there. But the official recognition of the island as an autonomous neighborhood would not come until the beginning of the XNUMXth century, when the then Bishop of Cartagena asked the King of Spain to order the construction of a church in Gethsemane, since it had grown so large. and it was so far from the Walled City that it was necessary for its inhabitants to have their own temple.  

Actually, in Gethsemane there was already a religious complex, built in the middle of the 1642th century by the order of the Franciscans. The complex was made up of the Convent of San Francisco, the Cloister, and the Chapel of Veracruz. However, the buildings had been seriously affected during an assault by French pirates on the city's port, so the Franciscan Order decided to abandon it. This is how, in XNUMX, work began on the Church of the Holy Trinity, located in the central square of Gethsemane, which today bears his name. 

cradle of independence 

Although in Colombia we usually celebrate our independence from Spain on July 20, as if that day in 1810 we had definitively and irremediably broken all our ties with the Crown, the truth is that this was a much more complex process, with ups and downs and dates that constantly intersect. In reality, what happened that Sunday in the main square of Bogotá was not our nation's declaration of independence, but an attempt by the city's elite to obtain greater political participation and control over the lands that the criollos and mestizos by right they belonged to them.  

As in Bogotá, many other cities in Colombia were going through similar situations, and it was not by chance. Two months before the outbreak in the capital, on May 22, 1810, in Cartagena the transition from a council —totally controlled by the Spanish— to a government junta in which the local people would have a greater degree of control had already been decreed. stake. It was, then, thanks to this fact that the rest of the territories of the viceroyalty were encouraged to do the same.  

A year and a half after this, in 1811, the situation in Cartagena was practically the same as before, and discontent among its inhabitants continued to grow. Thus, a group of landowners, artisans, and merchants from the Getsemaní neighborhood decided to meet to demand that the junta declare the total autonomy of the state of Cartagena.  

The group was headed by Pedro Romero, a Cuban who led the so-called Milicias Pardas —or Lanceros de Cartagena—. On the morning of November 11 of that year, Pedro and his men met at his house, located on the famous Calle Larga, to leave together from there to the government office to put pressure on while debating whether or not to declare the ultimate independence.  

The first step was to take military control of the neighborhood, so they headed towards their strongholds to steal the cannons. The main bastion was that of the Medialuna gate, and the others were that of the Redoubt —on one side of the Roman Bridge, which connects Gethsemane with the island of Manga— and that of Barahona —located where the Centro de Cartagena Conventions. Having seized all three, the revolutionaries did the unthinkable: they turned them around and, for the first time, the weapons of the Spanish Crown did not point towards the Caribbean Sea but towards the heart of the neighborhood.  

That same afternoon of November 11, 1811, what had begun as a distant dream of the people of Gethsemane became a reality: Cartagena was, at last, "a free, sovereign and independent state."  

a living history 

More than 200 years after that heroic event, the dreamy and tenacious spirit of the inhabitants of Gethsemane is still as alive as the day the cannons on the wall were aimed at the Plaza de la Trinidad. Like Pedro Romero and his people, today the streets of the neighborhood have been taken over by culture, like a cry for freedom that does not stop and that is heard in each song, each mural, each dance, and each smile that the gethsemane.  

History, to understand it, you have to live it: live it through art and immerse yourself in an experience like no other, while learning Spanish and exploring the culture of the Colombian Caribbean like a local.  

The school Nueva Lengua It is based in the Callejón Ancho de Getsemaní, one block from the Plaza de la Trinidad. Check the plans that we have for you in the city, or write to us at info@nuevalengua.com for more information about our Spanish courses in Cartagena.  

We are looking forward to seeing you in this Special Mini-webinar!