The shuttered windows complete a full circle around the raised bedroom of the huts and the

The shuttered windows complete a full circle around the raised bedroom of the huts and the view moves from thick leaves over the smooth rocks, onto the white sand driven backwards by the roaring waves of the Caribbean Sea.Strong tides and powerful breaks mean swimming is not advisable on the longer of these wild beaches but a short horse-ride from the lodge, through a forest alive with giant lizards, spider monkeys and butterflies, paradise gets even better. The first sign of the the sea comes with the pale mauve crabs scuttling in the undergrowth before the trail ends in a sand dune.Los Eco-Cabinas, at Ca?ral, are among only a handful of permanent structures inside the park. Where the main road ends the rainforest begins; flowers of paradise peek out from the dense foliage. After three hours, the Sierra Nevada rises out of the Caribbean and up to a snow-capped peak, far out of sight above the cloud line.Leaving Santa Marta, the road climbs into the Parque Tayrona, once home to a Pre-Colombian civilisation and now one of the country's most beautiful reserves. The road, only a few inches above the swamp, continues like this along the coast as far as Santa Marta, the first of the Spanish-settled cities. As you head north, the mud flat beaches of the city give way to lush wetlands, where storks patrol the water lilies.

But Cartagena's beauty is in its architecture, not its beaches, whose greyish-brown sand is home to murky water, squadrons of plastic bags and the wooden canoes of fisherman. The latter supply the fish and seafood that form the basis of every meal, from street food to the pressed linen and luxury of the Club de Pesca - arguably the city's finest restaurant, and certainly its most beautiful.Locals, meanwhile, speak in excited tones of Tayrona, a four-hour drive out of Cartagena. Girls dance in football shirts with an effortless sway of the hips.Waking to the heat of another day in the tropics, thoughts inevitably turn to the sea. The crowds start to arrive after 11pm and keep coming long after midnight. Inside, the drink of choice, as everywhere in Colombia, is aguardiente, served by the bottle with ice. Rising out of the warm water like a graphic equaliser, its uneven tower blocks compete with each other like children intent on proving who's tallest.Our literary tour is winding down and as we pass the modern art museum, Jaime recalls a drunken night when a young Gabo and friends stumbled across a painting by a local artist of a clown's face.

The only problem was that the work of art was on a restaurant door. After haggling they persuaded the owner to sell them the door. To celebrate the group went to the brothels of working-class Getsemani. When they awoke, it was gone.Getsemani is still the focal point for the city's nightlife and a strip of clubs on the waterfront offers everything from salsa to heavy rock. Today he stares down from bronze statues in the plazas, and is celebrated as the founder of Cartagena.By now the city has spilled far beyond the fortress walls and many of the wealthier Cartagenans are crowded onto the thin finger of landbetween* * the harbour and the sea, the Bocagrande. He tortured the locals into revealing their burial sites, then he and his men looted all the ceremonial gold The grave robber was duly rewarded with the title Marquis.

A few look European, a few Indian and some African, but almost everybody is a mixture.The initial draw of Cartagena was its natural harbour, 10 miles wide and three miles long. The Spanish adventurer Pedro de Heredia arrived early in the 16th century Heredia, a serial duellist, fled here from Spain. The clientele are almost all European, but everywhere else there are reminders of the city's past in the people that now live there. The life of an 18th-century Marquis is easy enough to imagine from the deep wicker chairs, fanned by the breeze from the fountain, watching toucans hop from leaf to branch.