Every couple I photograph in Cartagena spends at least one evening in Getsemani and comes back saying it was the best part of the trip. Then they ask why their ceremony photos aren’t from there. The answer is that most photographers default to the walled city because it’s familiar and the light is easy. Getsemani is one block outside the walls, the architecture is equally extraordinary, and the neighbourhood has a quality of life to it that the tourist-heavy interior of the walled city lost a decade ago. I shoot ceremonies in Getsemani regularly now and it consistently produces the strongest Cartagena work in my portfolio.

What Getsemani Actually Is

Getsemani was the working-class neighbourhood that grew up outside the city walls when the wealthy Spanish families occupied the interior. It was considered dangerous through the 1990s and early 2000s. By 2015 it had been discovered by artists, restaurants, and independent hotels. What it has now is the specific quality of a neighbourhood that was genuinely lived-in before it became desirable: the buildings are older and less restored than in the walled city, the street art covers walls that were plain brick a decade ago, and the plazas still function as community spaces rather than tourist staging areas. The Trinidad Plaza on Friday and Saturday evenings has music and dancing and food carts and families, which is not something that happens in the plazas inside the walls with the same organic quality.

The balconies are the visual signature. Colonial balconies with bright painted wooden balusters and flowering vines exist throughout the historic city, but in Getsemani they haven’t been stripped back to a neutral palette for boutique hotel renovation. They are whatever colour the person who painted them last chose, which means they are extraordinary. The balcony on Calle de la Sierpe with the orange-painted wood above the yellow wall and the bougainvillea falling over the edge of it: that is a photograph that you don’t find inside the walls because inside the walls the renovation aesthetic has standardised things.

Colourful balcony with vibrant wooden balusters and green foliage in Getsemani neighbourhood Cartagena Colombia — Getsemani: the specific balcony aesthetic that makes this neighbourhood different from the walled city. The colours are whatever the resident chose, not whatever the hotel renovation guide recommended.

The Streets and How I Use Them

Getsemani’s street grid is smaller than the walled city, which means a session moves through its key visual material in two hours on foot without backtracking. I start at the Trinidad Plaza, the neighbourhood’s main square, in the early morning before the cafes open. The square has a colonial church on one side, a basketball court on another, and the surrounding residential buildings with their specific Getsemani balcony character on the remaining sides. At 7am it has the light from the east catching the church facade and nobody in it except one or two people going to morning mass. At 10am it is a tourist destination.

The streets between the plaza and the walls are where I spend the most session time. Calle de la Sierpe, Calle Guerrero, and the block of La Unidad between Calle 25 and Calle 26 give the most consistent combination of wall colour, street texture, and overhead balcony detail. The murals change every season: the neighbourhood has an active street art programme and I scout before every session to understand what is currently there. Some of the best backdrops I have used in Getsemani are murals that no longer exist.

Quiet colonial street in Cartagena Colombia lined with whitewashed buildings colourful balconies and tropical greenery in the historic neighbourhood — The specific Cartagena street character: whitewashed walls, wooden balconies, tropical vines. In Getsemani this combination exists in a neighbourhood that still has people living in it, which changes the photographs.

Why Getsemani Over the Walled City

The walled city is extraordinary and I photograph in it. But every elopement photographer in Cartagena photographs in it, which means the visual vocabulary of the interior has been worked over extensively. The specific arch of the clock tower portal, the Plaza de los Coches at sunset, the flower-covered balconies on the main drag: all of it has been photographed thousands of times in ceremony clothing. Getsemani has the same architectural quality in a neighbourhood that has not been exhausted by elopement photography. A ceremony in the Trinidad Plaza or on Calle de la Sierpe produces photographs that are specifically Cartagena and are not the same photographs everyone already has.