448 Residents. Getsemaní Lost 91% of Its People in Twenty Years.

Human Becoming

The Woman Who Stayed

She has lived on Calle del Pozo for forty-three years. Her grandmother was born in the same house, which is to say the house has been in the family since before Getsemaní was interesting to anyone who did not already live there. When she talks about the neighborhood, she uses the present tense for things that no longer exist: the corner store where her mother bought fish, the courtyard where children played dominos after school, the bakery that made pan de bono at four in the morning. These places are not gone in the way that businesses sometimes close. They are gone because the buildings that held them were purchased, gutted, and converted into boutique hotels, co-working spaces, and Airbnb listings priced at $120 a night.

She is sixty-one. She is Afro-Colombian. She lives alone now. Her two sons moved to Turbaco — a town thirty minutes south of Cartagena — because they could not afford to rent in the neighborhood where they were born. Her neighbor to the left sold in 2019 after receiving the seventh offer in two years from a Bogotá-based investment group. Her neighbor to the right left in 2021 after property taxes tripled following a cadastral reassessment that valued her home at forty times what her family had paid for it. The reassessment was technically accurate. The neighborhood had appreciated. The woman to the right simply could not afford to live in a place that was now worth what the assessor said it was worth.

The woman on Calle del Pozo has not sold. She has been offered, by her count, eleven times. The most recent offer came from a company registered in Panama that wanted to convert her home into a "heritage experience" — a boutique guesthouse marketed to international tourists as an authentic immersion in Cartagena’s Afro-Colombian culture. The irony was not lost on her. They wanted to sell her culture after the culture’s actual practitioners had been pushed out. She declined. She is not sure how much longer she can hold.

She is one of 448.

Structural Read

The Arithmetic of Disappearance

Getsemaní is a neighborhood of approximately 10 square blocks in the historic center of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. It sits immediately south of the walled colonial core that UNESCO designated as a World Heritage Site in 1984. Getsemaní was not originally part of the tourist circuit. It was the working-class barrio — the place where Afro-Colombian laborers, fishermen, domestic workers, and small vendors lived because the colonial elite had confined them there centuries earlier. It was, by the logic of colonial spatial hierarchy, the least valuable real estate inside the walls.^[1]

In 2005, the Colombian national census recorded 5,378 permanent residents in Getsemaní. The most recent demographic surveys, compiled from municipal data and academic fieldwork through 2025, count 448. That is a 91.7% population decline in twenty years. No war. No natural disaster. No epidemic. Just market forces, enabled by a heritage designation, operating on a community that lacked the economic power to resist them.^[2]

The mechanism is straightforward, and that is what makes it so devastating. The UNESCO designation of 1984 applied to Cartagena’s walled city as a whole. It triggered international visibility, which triggered tourism growth, which triggered property speculation, which triggered a price spiral that priced out the existing population. Getsemaní, as the last affordable section of the walled city, was the final frontier of this process. It was not gentrified overnight. It was gentrified over two decades, block by block, house by house, in a process that accelerated dramatically after 2010.^[3]

The numbers tell the story in their own language. A property in Getsemaní that sold for 40 million Colombian pesos in the early 1990s now commands approximately 2 billion pesos — a 50-fold increase over roughly thirty years. Closing prices in the neighborhood have reached $350 per square foot, comparable to mid-tier markets in the United States. Between 2022 and 2025, property values in the historic center appreciated 28%, driven by foreign investment and short-term rental yields that average 8-12% gross annually.^[4]

The short-term rental economy is the engine of this transformation. Cartagena hosts between 7,331 and 16,000 active short-term rental listings, depending on the data source and methodology — figures that place it among the most saturated STR markets per capita in Latin America. The spread in estimates reflects the opacity of the market: many listings operate without formal registration, and the regulatory framework has lagged far behind the reality on the ground. What is not in dispute is the direction. Every year, more residential units convert to tourist accommodation. Every conversion removes a home and replaces it with an income-generating asset owned, overwhelmingly, by people who do not live in the neighborhood.^[5]

The tourism pipeline feeding this demand is enormous and growing. Rafael Núñez International Airport processed 7.76 million passengers in 2024, a figure that has grown consistently year over year. The city received approximately 780,000 foreign tourists in 2024. Luxury hotel brands — Four Seasons, Viceroy — have entered the market with developments that anchor the high end of the price spectrum and pull surrounding property values upward. Cruise ship arrivals add transient foot traffic that transforms residential streets into commercial corridors without any formal zoning change.^[6]

Getsemaní absorbed the full force of this transformation because of its specific position in Cartagena’s spatial economy. The Centro Histórico — the walled city proper, dominated by churches, museums, and colonial mansions — had already been converted to tourism infrastructure by the 2000s. San Diego, the neighborhood adjacent to the Centro, followed in the early 2010s. Getsemaní was the last holdout — and its “authenticity” became the very product that drove its destruction. Tour operators marketed it as “the real Cartagena.” Travel writers praised its street art, its salsa bars, its “vibrant local culture.” Instagram influencers photographed its painted doorways. The more authentic it was proclaimed to be, the more valuable it became to buyers. The more valuable it became, the fewer authentic residents could afford to remain. The paradox is not subtle. It is the central mechanism.^[7]

The Racial Architecture

The displacement in Getsemaní is not racially neutral. It cannot be analyzed without understanding who is being pushed out and who is moving in.

Getsemaní was historically and remains culturally an Afro-Colombian neighborhood. Its identity — the champeta music, the oral traditions, the food culture, the social structures organized around extended family networks and communal spaces — derives from the Afro-descendant communities that settled there during and after the colonial period. The people who built Getsemaní’s cultural identity are the same people who are being displaced by the commercialization of that identity.^[8]

Nationally, 60% of Afro-Colombians live below the poverty line. In Cartagena, where Afro-descendants constitute a significant proportion of the population, the poverty rate remains approximately 30% despite the city’s position as Colombia’s premier tourism destination. The tourism wealth does not reach the communities it displaces. It flows through them — literally through their neighborhoods, their streets, their former homes — without stopping.^[9]

Melissa Valle, a researcher whose academic work has focused on racial erasure in Colombian urban development, has documented how Getsemaní’s transformation follows a pattern she identifies as “heritage whitening” — the process by which a neighborhood’s cultural heritage is preserved as aesthetic product while its cultural producers are removed. The street art stays. The music plays in bars now owned by foreign entrepreneurs. The food is served in restaurants that employ Afro-Colombian cooks but are owned by investors from Bogotá, Medellín, or abroad. The heritage is extracted from the people who created it and repackaged as an experience for people who can afford to consume it.^[10]

This is not a metaphor. It is a property transaction pattern. When an Afro-Colombian family sells a home they have occupied for three generations to an investment group that converts it into a boutique hotel marketed as a “Getsemaní heritage experience,” the transaction is simultaneously an economic exchange and a racial displacement. The family leaves. The heritage stays — as decor.

The remaining 448 residents are disproportionately elderly. The demographic surveys indicate that 33.6% of the remaining population is over sixty. This is not because elderly residents are more resistant to displacement. It is because they are the ones with the fewest options: fixed incomes that cannot support relocation to comparably central locations, social networks that have already been shattered by the departure of younger family members, and an attachment to place that is, in the literal sense, a lifetime investment. Thirty-two percent of the remaining residents report that they plan to leave within five years. The 448 is not a floor. It is a waypoint.^[2]

The UNESCO Paradox

In 1984, UNESCO inscribed the “Port, Fortresses and Group of Monuments, Cartagena” on the World Heritage List. The designation recognized the city’s colonial architecture, its military fortifications, and its role in the history of the Spanish Empire in the Americas. The stated purpose was preservation: to ensure that Cartagena’s built heritage would be protected from destruction, deterioration, or incompatible development.^[11]

What the designation actually did was create a global brand. And brands attract capital.

The UNESCO label functions in real estate markets the way an appellation d’origine contrôlée functions in wine markets: it certifies authenticity, which commands a premium. Properties inside the UNESCO-designated perimeter trade at multiples of comparable properties outside it. The designation does not merely protect heritage; it monetizes it. And the monetization, unchecked by adequate regulatory frameworks, produces the displacement that the designation was ostensibly designed to prevent.

This is not unique to Cartagena. The pattern has been documented in Dubrovnik, Venice, Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, Havana Vieja, and dozens of other UNESCO-designated urban sites. But Cartagena’s case is distinctive for three reasons. First, the speed: a 91% population decline in twenty years is among the most extreme recorded in any heritage district globally. Second, the racial dimension: the displaced population is overwhelmingly Afro-Colombian, adding a layer of racial dispossession to the economic displacement. Third, the absence of meaningful policy response: Colombia has no national framework for managing tourism-driven displacement in heritage zones, and Cartagena’s municipal government has been, at best, ambivalent — collecting the tax revenue generated by the property boom while failing to implement protections for resident communities.^[12]

The irony is structural. UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention requires signatory states to protect the “outstanding universal value” of designated sites. But “outstanding universal value” has been interpreted almost exclusively in terms of built heritage — the physical structures, the architecture, the monuments. The living culture that gave those structures meaning — the people, the social practices, the community networks — falls outside the definition. You can comply with UNESCO’s requirements while emptying a neighborhood of everyone who made it culturally significant. The walls are protected. The people inside them are not.

Pattern Confirmation

The Model That Scales

Getsemaní is not an anomaly. It is a template.

The same mechanism — heritage designation as investment catalyst, tourism growth as displacement engine, short-term rental conversion as the final phase — is operating in cities across Latin America and the Caribbean. In Oaxaca, Mexico, the Centro Histórico has seen comparable residential-to-tourist conversions, accelerated by the post-pandemic “digital nomad” migration. In Havana, the restoration of Habana Vieja has produced a two-tier economy where renovated buildings serve international tourists while adjacent blocks lack running water. In Antigua, Guatemala, the colonial center is effectively a living museum where the performing culture is staffed but not inhabited.^[13]

What makes Cartagena’s case a leading indicator is the completeness of the cycle. Most heritage displacement narratives are captured mid-process: residents are being pushed out, prices are rising, the character is changing. Getsemaní is at the terminal stage. Ninety-one percent displacement is not a trend. It is a conclusion. What remains is a neighborhood in name only — a geographic designation applied to a place whose population has been almost entirely replaced by transient occupants, investment properties, and commercial operations themed around the culture of the people who were removed.

The investment dynamics reinforce the irreversibility. At $350 per square foot and 8-12% gross yields, the economic incentive structure makes residential reversion mathematically implausible. No policy intervention short of expropriation or massive subsidization could make it economically rational for a property owner to convert a functioning short-term rental back into a residential unit occupied by a low-income family. The market has spoken. It said: this land is worth more without these people on it.

The Four Seasons and Viceroy developments represent the institutional validation of this conclusion. When a global luxury brand enters a market, it does not speculate on future transformation. It certifies that the transformation has already occurred. The presence of these brands in Cartagena’s historic center signals to the international investment community that the neighborhood is “safe” — meaning: the displacement is sufficiently advanced that the remaining low-income residents cannot reverse it. The luxury hotel is, in this analysis, a tombstone: it marks the point at which the original community’s displacement became permanent.^[14]

And the capital continues to arrive. The 28% property appreciation between 2022 and 2025 demonstrates that the market has not peaked. International buyers — Americans, Europeans, wealthy Colombians from Bogotá and Medellín — continue to enter, drawn by yields that exceed comparable markets in Mexico, Costa Rica, and the Caribbean islands. The Colombian peso’s relative weakness against the dollar amplifies the dynamic: American buyers find Cartagena property “affordable” by U.S. standards, which is another way of saying they can outbid local residents by a factor that makes competition meaningless.

What Remains

The 448 residents of Getsemaní are not a community in any functional sense. They are the residue of a community. The social infrastructure that made the neighborhood a living place — the schools, the churches that served as community centers, the informal economic networks, the extended family systems — has been hollowed out. The schools closed because there were no longer enough children. The churches serve tourists now. The corner stores became cocktail bars. The courtyards where neighbors gathered are walled gardens behind boutique hotel facades.

What the 448 have is proximity to what was. They live in a museum of their own displacement, surrounded by the aesthetic artifacts of their culture deployed as marketing material for an industry that has no structural interest in their continued presence. The street art — which emerged organically from the community’s creative traditions — is now maintained and commissioned by the tourism board. The champeta music plays on schedule in venues that charge cover. The food is served at prices that the cooks who perfected the recipes cannot afford.

This is the terminal condition of heritage gentrification: the culture survives as product. The people survive as cost.

Thirty percent of Cartagena’s population lives in poverty. Seven hundred eighty thousand foreign tourists arrived in 2024. These two facts coexist without tension in the official narrative, because the official narrative treats tourism as economic development and economic development as universally beneficial. The data does not support this assumption. The tourism wealth concentrates in the hands of property owners, hotel operators, and service industry employers. The displaced communities — relocated to peripheral neighborhoods like Turbaco, Bayunca, and El Pozón — are further from the economic activity, further from the services, further from the city they built.^[15]

The woman on Calle del Pozo knows all of this. She does not need a research paper to explain it. She can see it from her doorway: the tourists photographing her street, the boutique hotel that used to be her neighbor’s house, the restaurant that serves the same food her grandmother made but charges what her grandmother earned in a week. She is one of 448, and the number is going down.

Alternative Explanations

It is possible that the population decline in Getsemaní reflects broader urbanization trends rather than tourism-specific displacement. Colombian cities have experienced significant intra-urban migration over the past two decades, with populations moving from dense historic centers to peripheral areas with newer housing stock. Under this reading, Getsemaní’s decline is a special case of a general pattern, and tourism is a contributing factor rather than the primary driver. This explanation has some merit for the initial period (2005-2012) but fails to account for the acceleration after 2015, when short-term rental penetration became the dominant land-use change. General urbanization does not produce 91% decline in a single neighborhood while surrounding areas maintain stable or growing populations.

A second counterargument holds that Getsemaní’s residents benefited from the property appreciation — that families who sold at 50x returns achieved significant wealth transfers that improved their economic position. This is partially true for property owners who sold at peak prices. But it ignores three populations: renters, who received nothing; owners who sold early (pre-2015) at fractions of current values; and owners who remain but face escalating tax burdens they cannot sustain. It also treats displacement as a financial transaction rather than a community destruction event. The family that sold their home for 2 billion pesos may have more money. They no longer have a neighborhood.

What is not known: The exact ownership composition of converted properties in Getsemaní — specifically, what percentage are held by foreign investors versus domestic investors versus individual Colombian buyers. Property registration data in Colombia is fragmented across multiple agencies, and the use of shell companies (often registered in Panama or the BVI) further obscures beneficial ownership.

What is not confirmed: Whether the Cartagena municipal government has formally studied the social impact of short-term rental conversion in the historic center. Anecdotal reporting suggests that no comprehensive social impact assessment has been conducted, but this has not been confirmed through official document requests.

What would change the signal: If Colombia implemented a national framework for heritage-zone residential protection — modeled on Barcelona’s tourist licensing moratorium or Lisbon’s local accommodation caps — the displacement trajectory could be altered, though the 91% already lost is functionally irreversible. If Cartagena’s property market experienced a significant correction (driven by peso appreciation, regional instability, or STR regulatory crackdown), the investment thesis would weaken, potentially slowing further conversion. If UNESCO revised its World Heritage framework to include living community preservation — not just built heritage — it would create a new accountability mechanism. None of these are currently in motion.

Monitoring indicators: Track Getsemaní resident count annually through municipal census data or academic surveys. Monitor Cartagena STR listing volume via AirDNA and Inside Airbnb quarterly. Track property transaction prices per square foot in the historic center. Monitor Colombian national policy on heritage-zone tourism management. Watch for UNESCO World Heritage Committee commentary on Cartagena’s compliance with preservation requirements. Track Cartagena airport passenger volumes and foreign tourist arrivals as demand-side indicators.