Walk it. That's the whole instruction.
Getsemaní rewards walking and nothing else. It's a small barrio of low 18th century buildings just outside the walls of the old city, and the thing worth doing is covering it slowly on foot with your phone in your pocket. Two hours will do it. Three if you stop.
We live on an island 25 minutes offshore, so we're not going to pretend Getsemaní is ours. But almost everyone who comes out to us spends a night or two in Cartagena first, and this is the walk we send them on when they ask what to do that isn't another fort.
Calle de la Sierpe: the murals
Start here if you want the street art, because this is where most of it is. Calle de la Sierpe snakes rather than running straight, which is how it got the name, and the walls along it carry the densest run of murals, stencils and painted shutters in the neighbourhood. Plenty more hides on the side streets either side, so turn off it whenever something catches your eye. You will not run out.
Much of what you're looking at traces back to December 2013, when the barrio hosted its first International Festival of Urban Art and invited national and international artists to paint work rooted in local stories. One of them, by the artist Yurika mdc, came from a tale an older neighbour told her about the María Mulata, the black bird you'll see all over Cartagena. In the story the birds were once brilliantly coloured and flew the townspeople out of a fire in their beaks, losing their colour to the smoke. Locals say you can still catch the old colours in the black feathers on a bright day. Knowing that turns one wall from decoration into something worth standing in front of.
Our take: skip the guided version unless you want the stories. The art is free, permanent and on a public street, and half the pleasure is finding a piece nobody pointed you at.
Plaza de la Trinidad: the living room
This is the square the barrio orbits, and it's the one place we'd tell you to sit down. It's a plain open plaza in front of a church rather than a manicured colonial set piece, which is exactly the point: it's used by the people who live around it. Come late in the afternoon and stay into the evening, when the light goes soft and the square fills up.
Our advice is to arrive without a table booked anywhere. Buy something from whoever is selling on the square, sit on the steps, and let the evening happen. If you want a proper dinner afterwards, the streets running off the plaza are lined with small kitchens and bars, most of them in converted old houses.
What Getsemaní actually is now
Worth knowing before you go, because the guidebooks are coy about it. For a long stretch Getsemaní was written off as unsafe and known mainly as a red-light district. Over the past decade the old colonial buildings have turned into hostels, small hotels and bistros, and it's become the part of Cartagena that people who dislike hotel zones talk about most.
That change is still in progress and it isn't uncomplicated. There's an edge to the place and there are people who have lived there for generations watching their street become a destination. Walk it like someone's neighbourhood, because that's what it is. Ask before you photograph a person or a doorway. It costs you nothing.
How much time to give it
Two hours on foot covers the murals and the plaza. A whole evening covers it properly. It sits directly outside the old city walls, so you can do the walled city in the day and Getsemaní from five o'clock onward without moving your bags anywhere.
If you're pairing the city with a day out at sea with us, the sequencing that works is simple. Our boat leaves the Muelle de la Bodeguita at 10am, 11:30am and 5pm, and comes back off the island at 4pm and 5:30pm. Take the 10am out, spend the day on the water, catch the 4pm back, shower, and be in Getsemaní by dusk. That's a good day by any standard.
What we'd skip
Getsemaní in the middle of the day in April is hot, shadeless in places and quiet in the wrong way. The murals don't move, but the barrio does, and it isn't much of a neighbourhood at 1pm. Go late.
We'd also skip trying to combine it with a big itinerary. It's a walk, not an attraction with an entrance. Pair it with nothing.
And if the evening in the city has done its job and you want to be somewhere with no traffic noise at all the next morning, well. See you on the boat.