The Port of Cartagena is Colombia's busiest port system, spread around the Bay of Cartagena on the Caribbean coast in the department of Bolívar (not to be confused with the Spanish port of the same name). Its terminals moved 2,862,787 TEU of containers in 2018, fourth among the ports of Latin America and the Caribbean that year, and the bay has been a working harbour since Pedro de Heredia founded the city on 1 June 1533. It matters because it is Colombia's main Caribbean outlet: public terminals such as the Sociedad Portuaria de Cartagena and Contecar handle containers and transshipment, more than 50 private docks serve the Mamonal industrial zone and Ecopetrol's Cartagena refinery, and Cartagena has led Colombia's container exports to the United States. Behind those figures are the people who built, work and live beside the bay, and the costs the bay itself has absorbed.
Zapata's Labourers and the Canal del Dique of 1650
A port is only as useful as its hinterland, and for Cartagena the hinterland was always the Magdalena River, Colombia's great highway into the Andes. The problem was that the Magdalena reached the sea far to the east. In 1649 Governor Pedro Zapata de Mendoza, advised by the fortifications engineer Juan de Somovilla y Tejada, asked the city council to cut a channel linking the bay to the river through a chain of lagoons. The treasury had no money, so Zapata pledged his own salary and signed personally as guarantor for a loan of 30,000 pesos.
Accounts of the workforce differ, from 200 men to about 2,000, but the fuller one describes labourers armed with hoes, axes, machetes, picks and shovels dug it. They were fed daily and paid eight pesos a month, more than the going rate for harder labour at the time. The work took six months: the channel was finished on 24 June 1650 and inaugurated on 20 August, following an S-shaped line of 129 km. A trip by canoe or flat-bottomed champán took three or four days.
The channel, the Canal del Dique, became the city's lifeline and its recurring expense. Leaseholders collected tolls but skipped maintenance, and by 1821 it was completely blocked. Trade drifted to Santa Marta and to Sabanilla, the outlet for Barranquilla, and Cartagena declined, hit also by a cholera epidemic in 1849. In 1845 the American engineer George M. Totten began a six-year rebuild costing 350,000 pesos, and the present route is still sometimes called the Totten canal. Later governments tried dredging, a Cartagena to Calamar railway opened in 1894 under Rafael Núñez (its rails were quietly lifted in 1953), and new contracts in 1923 and the 1950s.
Silver, Enslaved Africans and Pirates in the Colonial Harbour
The colonial port was built on two cargoes. Outbound went silver from Potosí, in present-day Bolivia, bound for Spain; inbound came enslaved Africans. Because Spain set up no trading posts in Africa, it relied on the asiento, licences sold to merchants of other nations, and by the 17th century Cartagena was one of the main slave markets of the Americas, centred on the Plaza de los Coches inside the walls. The first enslaved people had been brought by Heredia himself to clear land.
The wealth drew attackers. The French corsair Jean-François Roberval, with 5 ships and 1,000 men, sacked the still unwalled town in 1544 and forced Heredia to retreat inland to Turbaco until a ransom was paid, and Francis Drake arrived in April 1586 with 23 ships and 3,000 men, burned 200 houses and the cathedral, and left only after a ransom was paid a month later. Spain answered by hiring the Italian engineer Bautista Antonelli to design a walled city, and building went on for two centuries, ending with Antonio de Arévalo's works: between 1771 and 1778 he laid a 3,400-yard underwater jetty, the Escollera, across the northern Bocagrande entrance. The bay's other entrance, Bocachica, lies to the south, and in April 1697 the French raiders Baron de Pointis and Jean-Baptiste Ducasse overwhelmed its fort, held by just 30 men, before sacking the city.
The largest test came in 1741, when Admiral Edward Vernon's British fleet of 50 warships, 130 transports and about 25,600 men besieged the city in the War of Jenkins' Ear and was repulsed by defenders under Sebastián de Eslava and Blas de Lezo; a failed assault on the fortress of San Felipe on 20 April left 800 British dead, and Vernon lifted the siege. The walls, forts and harbour are now listed together by UNESCO, since 1984, as "Port, Fortresses and Group of Monuments, Cartagena".
Manga, Contecar and El Bosque: The Working Waterfront
The modern port is a patchwork of public and private operators. The main public terminals are those of the Sociedad Portuaria de Cartagena, whose container yard is on Manga island, and its Contecar terminal, alongside Muelles El Bosque and the bulk and coal terminal known as Puerto de Mamonal. Together these three main terminal groups handle only about 20% of all the cargo moved in the bay; the rest crosses more than 50 private docks strung along the industrial shore of the bay, where the city's larger firms include Argos and Cemex (cement), Dow Chemical, SABMiller and the refinery.
Who benefits? Cartagena has been the leading Colombian port for container exports to the United States, with a 47% share against 24% for Buenaventura on the Pacific, 18% for Santa Marta and 11% for Barranquilla. Tourism shares the same water: roughly 150 cruise ships call each year, and the city is a boarding port for Royal Caribbean. The city around the port grew sevenfold between 1951 and 2001, from 129,000 to 827,000 people, a 3.9% annual rate that outpaced Barranquilla and the national average. That growth has not been even: districts such as Nelson Mandela house many families displaced from northern Bolívar, while the Bocagrande peninsula holds the hotels and a naval base.
Mamonal and the US$8 Billion Reficar Expansion
South of the city, along the eastern shore of the bay, runs the Mamonal industrial zone. In 2004 its 209 large and medium firms generated about 8.04% of Colombia's industrial output, and industry as a whole provides about 10% of jobs in the city. Its anchor is the Cartagena refinery, built in 1957 by Intercol and bought by the state oil company Ecopetrol in 1974. Its own terminal has two jetties able to take tankers of up to 85,000 deadweight tonnes, and its site gives it access both to the Caribbean and, via the Canal del Dique and pipelines, to the interior. Free zones add further jobs: La Candelaria, in the heart of Mamonal, covers 141 hectares and houses 52 companies employing about 2,200 people.
The refinery's modernisation, carried out with the American contractor Chicago Bridge & Iron, roughly doubled in cost. The investment planned in 2009 was US$3,993 million; by 2015 it had reached US$8,016 million. More than 34,000 workers, 95% of them Colombian, took part, and on 21 October 2015 President Juan Manuel Santos opened the valve on the new crude unit; the first refined products followed on 10 November 2015. The finished plant has 34 units on 140 hectares. Capacity rose from about 80,000 to 165,000 barrels a day, and in 2021 the plant produced 19% of the diesel and 21% of the petrol Colombia consumed. More than 3,500 people work there, most of them from Cartagena, and the wider petrochemical cluster generates around 12,000 jobs.
Sediment, Corals and the 2010 Breach: What the Bay Pays
The Canal del Dique that once saved the port has become its main environmental cost. Until the 1930s it drained into the Bay of Barbacoas; between 1932 and 1934 a dredger of the Frederick Snare Company cut a link that began sending fresh Magdalena water into the Bay of Cartagena at Pasacaballos, turning it into an estuary. Each later straightening made the flow faster. Standard Dredging's works in 1950 to 1952 cut the number of bends and let more sediment in; by 1960 one channel, the caño del Estero, had silted up completely. The rectification of 1981 to 1984 widened the bed from 45 to 65 metres, and the increased discharge of river water and silt into the bay caused ecological problems. The sediment is also suspected, though not proven, of harming the coral reefs of the Corales del Rosario y San Bernardo national park, whose Rosario Islands lie about 20 km from Cartagena.
The people along the canal have borne the risk too. In December 2010 a 214-metre stretch of embankment gave way, and the water flooded several towns in northern Bolívar and southern Atlántico. Colombia's environment ministry had ordered a restoration plan for the canal's degraded ecosystems as early as 1997, and since 2013 river diversions designed with the Dutch firm Royal HaskoningDHV have aimed to control sediment and flow, creating new mangrove wetland along the way.
At the harbour mouth, the island of Tierra Bomba covers 19.84 km² and is home to about 9,000 people. In January 2014 it was announced as the site of a new 33.4-hectare Caribbean base for the Colombian Navy, one more claim on a bay that already serves traders, refiners, cruise passengers and fishermen.
From Zapata's labourers in 1650 to the 34,000 who built the new refinery, Cartagena's port has always been an argument about who pays and who gains. For the sea it faces, read our guide to the Caribbean Sea; for the country behind it, our Colombia country guide; and for the transshipment rival further west on the Caribbean coast, our history of the Port of Colón in Panama.