January 24, 2007

LATIN AMERICA | COLOMBIA | CARTAGENA

Latin Literati

By Mark Jolly

The sister event to Britain’s Hay Festival is back in Cartegena for a second round

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Tomorrow, the culture-fest Bill Clinton called “the Woodstock of the mind” opens in Cartagena, Colombia. The original Hay Festival, held for the past 20 years in the tiny Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye (pop: 1,300; bookshops: 39), is Britain’s definitive literary event. When the festival hosted its first sister festival in Colombia last year, Cartagena resident Gabriel Garcia Marquez was the guest of honor. (If you can’t bring a Latin laureate to the mountain, bring the mountain to him.) Now, the second edition features Bob Geldof; Vanity Fair polemicist, Christopher Hitchens; and Babel screenwriter, Guillermo Arriaga.

The colonial beach city — whose architectural beauty is invariably compared to Havana — is booming, not least because of Colombia’s dramatic security turnaround: kidnappings are down 85 percent from 2002, and foreign visitor numbers are at their highest for two decades (one million). Now, the Sofitel Cartagena Santa Clara, which is set on a 17th century parapet with canons pointing out to the Caribbean, has just opened a full-service spa (pictured) — the chain’s first in South America. With the cruise cognoscenti now getting wind of the place and a crop of new boutique hotels — such as Quadrifolio, Hotel Casa del Arzobispado, and La Merced — Cartagena is ready for its close up: director Mike Newell has just finished shooting Garcia Marquez’s novel, Love in the time of Cholera, there. The $50-million production, starring Javier Bardem, is Colombia’s biggest film to date.