Day tripping to the city with the harbor

I have long ago wanted to go and visit Cartagena in Columbia – partly because it used to have a reputation as the place with the best value diving in the world. So when we are staying in Murcia – only a short drive from Cartagena I obviously had to go. Yeah sure it is Cartagena Spain – and not Cartagena Columbia but it sounds close enough to have a look at what is around in the city.

We arrive at the city and it is nice and sunny we get to the city. We drive pass the harbor searching for a place to park the car. We find a parking garage a little bit away from the harbor right next to the entrance to the old town. We leave the car and get up to a square where there seems to be a bit of major repairs going on – which is a shame since it might have been a pretty place if there wasn’t the construction going on.

The city got a lot of pretty buildings and we walk through a few streets covered by nice fairly modern buildings until we reach a little square in front of the theater of the city with a couple of restaurants located there – with the sun shining it is an obvious chance to have a drink while soaking in the sun.

After finishing the drinks we head down to the harbor to have a look – the water is nice and blue and there are many pleasure boats down in the harbor some will offer sailing tours during the tourist season.

What we have seen so far has been fairly modern – but the city actually got a very long history dating back to the founding of the city by the Phoenicians. Later the city was taken over by Hasdrubal – the father of Hannibal – who renamed the city Carthago Nova. After Hannibal finally was defeated by the Romans and the Carthagian colonies in Spain was conquer by the Roman the city became a roman settlement.

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We walk from the harbor along some small roads and we get to an old Roman theater – it is behind a fence and not open to the public so we can only catch some glimpses of the theater through the fence. There are actually a couple of archeological attracts which are open to the public – just not on a Monday so I guess our visit wasn’t very well timed if we wanted to see them. The only place we can see probably is at a square where there have been some excavations of the old remains below – and they have clear the dirt away so you can see the ancient Roman road down below which were used in the old days. I guess this road continue through the city a couple of meters beneath the many houses in the city so they will probably not dig out the rest of the road.

We continue walking a bit through the city enjoying the many modern era buildings which are pretty nice and then we get to the car and drive back to Murcia.