Cartagena, Colombia
Photographers: Hemis/Alamy
Cartagena is a city of bold images and complicated histories, as new book by Lauren Santo Domingo and Johanna Ortiz shows. The city's UNESCO-listed Old Town may owe its look to the coffers or King Philip II of Spain, but it bristles with colours born entirely of its Caribbean coastline. ladies in bright dresses of African design, who walk the streets posing for snaps, but whose origins lie in San Basilio de Palenque, a 17th-century village of runaway slaves that became the first ‘free’ town in the Americas. This shot brings these two sides of the city together with another icon: the voluptuous by Fernando Botero, an artist who knows that true beauty comes from the shape of imperfect things. It is Cartagena in a nutshell: seductive yet with a depth that rewards the traveller who looks closer.
