MAGAN'S WORLD:NOTHING COULD better convince the world that Colombia is no longer the Hades of narco-terrorism than the sight of matronly English women in sensible Debenhams dresses swinging their stiff hips to a salsa beat in an elegant colonial plaza – women who'd normally never stray beyond the reassuring pips of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour knocking back mojitos and flirting with Latino bad boys.
That’s what is so miraculous about the Cartagena Hay Literary Festival, Hay-on-Wye’s sultry, sun-splashed love child, held each January in the Caribbean town of Cartagena, in northern Colombia. The fact that Britain’s most Home Counties festival – Hay-on-Wye might be in Wales, but it becomes an English outpost each summer – would even consider moving to the cocaine centre of the world displays the Pythonesque sense of the ridiculous in which the English excel. This is the same instinct that led them to move their government in India to a series of mountain villages each summer, so that for half the year a fifth of mankind was ruled from hill stations connected to the outside world by little more than a pony track.
It’s heroic in a way. The self-belief to imagine that dragging their panama-hatted, summer-frocked literary festival to a land primarily associated with kidnappings, cartels and cocaine was possible is admirable, and the fact that they’ve pulled it off is astounding. The first year or two it was hard to convince the literati to replace their Savile Row jackets and picnic hampers with bikinis and caipirinhas, but by hiring one of the world’s leading security firms, which normally provides protection in war zones, they were able to ease people’s fears and attract writers of the calibre of Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie.
Cartagena is one of those mystique-infused towns that is instantly captivating, and given that Gabriel García Márquez was born nearby, and still has a house there, it is an ideal location for a literary festival.
Locals claim that much of Gabo’s magic realism and fanciful stories were sparked by simply looking out of his front door to the labyrinth of narrow cobbled streets that form the old city, a Unesco World Heritage site surrounded by huge stone fortifications built in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The shuttered colonial homes decorated with wood-beamed balconies and imposing stone towers must, I imagine, provide ideal venues for literary events, while the pretty palm-shaded plazas would serve as decompression zones in which to recover from the inevitable excess of literary peacockery.
Anyone familiar with literary festivals will recognise the constricting claustrophobia that comes upon one after listening to one too many egotistical authors attempt faux humility. The constant carnival that animates Cartagena between the various shoeshine men, elderly chess players, young Lotharios and graceful Carmen Mirandas would act as a perfect counterfoil.
For those of us besotted by Colombia and forever seeking to encourage others to visit, Cartagena has always been the place to send neophytes. It was the one completely safe city, as neither the guerrilla war nor the drug cartels came near it. Nowadays, of course, the whole country is pretty safe.
For a country unspoiled by tourism, with rainforests, snow-capped mountains and great beaches, Colombia is the secret gem of South America. One just needs to get over all those images of psychotic drug barons from Hollywood thrillers. Perhaps Cartagena this January is the place to start.