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Historic slave port, architectural jewel and one-time home to Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Cartagena de Indias — the Carthage of the New World — has always brought out the best and worst in people. Founded on Colombia’s Caribbean coast in 1533, it has been pulling tourists for centuries, one of the first being English navigator and admiral Sir Francis Drake.

Popping by unexpectedly in 1586, Drake threatened to burn the city to the ground if the locals didn’t pay him 10 million pesos. They met his demands, but decided that to safeguard their city they would build one of the most impressive system of fortifications in the world, some ten kilometers of defensive wall, 12 metres high and up to 17 metres thick, that encircled the city and was punctuated at regular intervals with turrets, cannon and crenellations. (Some say its mortar was mixed with bulls’ blood.)

Las Murallas (The Walls), as they are known today, took two hundred years to complete, due to repeated storm damage and pirate attacks, not to mention some thoroughly understandable motivation problems in the work force, many of whom were African slaves.

Wandering about the walls today, it’s easy to see what Drake was so exited about. Apart from its gold and jewels (the conquistadores used the city to stockpile treasure plundered from the Indians, before shipping it back to Spain), Cartagena was, and remains, a stunning little city, falling over itself with charm, style and a peculiarly Caribbean kind of laizze faire.

It is also a cosy place, consummately manageable (despite being Colombia’s second largest port), with just 800,000 inhabitants and an endearing, old world intimacy. There is a newer, resort style section called Bocagrande (or “Bigmouth”), to the south, but the older, more interesting part of Cartagena is only a kilometre across. Here you’ll find the historic districts of El Centro, San Diego and Getsemaní, with their narrow, cobbled streets and pastel facades, baby blue and pistachio green, all the tall wooden doors studded with giant iron nails.

There’s no end of straight up tourist attractions in Cartagena, including the impressive Palace of the Inquisition, at Plaza de Bolivar. Built in 1776, and featuring a magnificently over the top Baroque stone gateway, the building served as a court to try heretics; today it’s a tidy little museum featuring documents, paintings and explanations about the Inquisition, plus the occasional instrument of torture. Outside, facing Calle de la Inquisición, is the small, barred window from which the tribunal’s sentences were announced to the public.

Then there’s the Museo del Oro y Arqueología (also in Plaza de Bolivar), and the monumental three storey Iglesia y Convento de San Pedro Claver, a church built by the Jesuits in 1603 and later dedicated to Saint Pedro Claver. Known as the “Slave of the Slaves”, Claver was a monk who lived in Cartagena, begging from door to door and passing on whatever he was given to the black slaves brought to the city. His body is in a glass coffin on the high altar; in the monastery you can see his cell and the balcony from which he sighted slave ships coming into the harbour.

There are beaches too, which, though fun for a sunset dip, probably won’t do much for most coast-dwelling Australians. The real buzz here is in the streets. Cartageneros are pathologically gregarious, having inherited the Spanish habit of conducting much of their private lives in public places. The streets are a kind of informal, open-air bazaar trafficking in almost every type of human interaction.

There are the buskers and footpath booksellers, fruit juice stands and stalls selling tinto, piping hot shots of sweet black coffee. There are kids selling cigarettes and chewing gum, newspaper boys and scruffy, hole-in-the-wall bars spilling out with salsa music and the bracing, over-proof aroma of aguardiente (a local hooch whose name means “fire-water”). Pot-bellied black men in white shirts and trilbies with feathers in the rim sit propped on beer crates. People lounge in doorways and talk through windows. Some parts the city resemble a run-down New Orleans, all overhanging balconies sagging with pot plants; in others, it feels like a tropical Seville, with Moorish back alleys and whitewashed walls.

Theoretically, the driest period is from December to April. If you go then you’ll also be able to catch Cartagena’s most important annual event, held on November 11, to celebrate the city’s declaration of independence from Spain in 1811. Men and women in masks and fancy dress roam the streets, playing instruments and throwing flowers and generally going certifiably crazy. One of my guidebooks actually gives a disclaimer about this festival, claiming it “tends to be wild and can de dangerous”. But don’t let this put you off. After all, what’s Colombia without a little buzz?

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