Getsemani was, for most of Cartagena's tourist history, the neighbourhood visitors passed through rather than stayed in — a dense, working-class barrio of colonial casas and street murals pressed against the walled city's southern gate. Hotel Capellán de Getsemaní changed that calculus when it was fitted into a restored two-storey colonial mansion on Calle de la Sierpe, its pale celadon facade, dark timber balustrades, and terracotta roof tiles restored to a condition that honours the original Spanish colonial construction rather than sanitising it. The coral stone door surrounds visible at street level are characteristic of Cartagena's sixteenth and seventeenth-century vernacular, and the hotel wears them without apology. Inside, the eighteen rooms navigate between colonial structure and contemporary comfort with some confidence. The grander suites retain exposed dark wood ceiling beams and black-and-white marble chequerboard floors, furnished with cane settees and upholstered headboards in pale linen — an atmosphere closer to a well-appointed Caribbean casa than a polished international hotel. Smaller rooms trade the beams for clean plaster ceilings but keep the dark-stained louvred shutters and travertine floors that maintain material continuity throughout. The rooftop pool terrace, clad in stone tile and travertine, sits above the neighbourhood's red-tiled roofscape at a level that catches the Caribbean evening light, the adjacent bar tiled in diamond-patterned encaustic. The Clero restaurant below, with its emerald velvet banquettes, antique mirror bar wall, and patterned cement-tile floor, completes the picture — considered without being overwrought.

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