I have a thing for cities that passed their prime centuries ago, former trading centres steeped in faded glory such as Bruges, Dubrovnik or Zanzibar. Cartagena fits the bill beautifully. It grew to life in the Age of Exploration as the Caribbean's biggest slaving port and an outlet for the mines of Peru. But its wealth made it prey for buccaneers and over the centuries its fortunes declined with that of imperial Spain. Gabriel García Márquez immortalised the city in Love in the Time of Cholera as "the most beautiful in the world" with its "marble palaces and the golden altars and the viceroys rotting with plague inside their armour". The master storyteller has a house in the Old Town, which any taxi driver will point out for you if you ask.

If I were to design an ideal city, it would look a lot like Cartagena: compact, pedestrian-oriented and architecturally harmonious, with reliably warm weather. One of my favourite places is the Plazuela de San Diego, a square with the intimate proportions and good acousticsof a ballroom. It has wooden-balconied colonial houses and a church painted whimsically bright yellow and blue, facing a courtyard with mature trees and, on weekends, live music. From a café table on a sultry evening, you can dance along with the locals or watch rich Colombians from the country's mountainous interior showing off their cars, their bodies and their clothes.