The Rest Is History

At the resplendent Four Seasons Cartagena, edifices of the past wow once more

- —JULIE COE

In Cartagena, the Colombian city strongly associated with the life and work of Gabriel García Márquez, the layers run as deep as the Nobel laureate's fiction. Five hundred years after the arrival of the Spanish, the Caribbean port attracts tourists with its well-preserved colonial structures, especially the old town's pretty pastel façades. The new Four Seasons Hotel and Residences Cartagena leans hard into these architectural riches, uniting into one compound a diverse coalition of buildings from across the centuries: a 17th-century theater, constructed among the partial ruins of a 16th-century Franciscan cloister, for example, and a Deco-era private club by French architect Ga