Cartagena is the more beautiful city. I’ll say that first because there’s a reason why Cartagena is the most visited city on the coast by tourists.
The walled city is one of the great colonial centres in the Americas and there’s nothing in Santa Marta that touches it. If you want to spend four days somewhere and come home with photographs, go to Cartagena.
Living there is a different question, and the answer changes a lot in favour of Santa Marta for the beach and mountain lifestyle that Cartagena just can’t match.
The two cities are 240 kilometres apart, four hours by road along the same coastline. Same sea, similar heat and same Costeño culture. Most people never compare them properly because Cartagena has the name recognition and Santa Marta gets treated as the place you fly into on your way to Tayrona National Park.
I’ve spent time in both cities and I picked Santa Marta because it has much better beaches and when I get tired of the heat, I can be in the cooler cloud forests in an hour hiking and birdwatching.
The cost of living in each city
My rough estimate for the cost of living puts Cartagena at $1,789 a month and Santa Marta at $1,392. That’s roughly a 30% difference but if you’re considering buying property, the savings in Santa Marta can be even bigger.
Rent in Bocagrande, which is where most long-term foreigners land in Cartagena, runs COP 2.2 to 4.5 million a month for a one-bedroom but what expats and digital nomads pay is actually much higher, at COP 3.5 to 7 million once you’re in furnished inventory. Your rent is probably going to be in the range of $835 to $1,670. The old city and Getsemaní are likely around $800 to $1,600 furnished.
By comparison, Santa Marta is a lot cheaper. Rents start around $500 to $1,000 for a modern one-bedroom in a safe neighbourhood, while they can go as high as $800 to $1,500 if you want to be on the beach in El Rodadero or Bello Horizonte.
Food is where the gap really opens. A local set lunch is $4 to $7 in Cartagena, but eat anywhere in Centro, Getsemaní or Bocagrande and you’re looking at $18 to $35 a head. In Santa Marta a casual meal is $3 to $6, and beachfront dining tops out around $15 to $25.
Electricity deserves consideration because it is very expensive on the coast. In Cartagena air conditioning bills are often in the range of COP 450,000 to 900,000 a month, so $110 to $220 on power alone.
In Santa, my utilities here run $50 to $100 total, and that includes the AC.
| Santa Marta | Cartagena | |
|---|---|---|
| Single person, monthly (Nomads) | $1,392 | $1,789 |
| Furnished 1BR, expat area | $500 to $1,000 | $835 to $1,670 |
| Beachfront 1BR | $800 to $1,500 | $1,200 to $2,900 (Bocagrande, Castillogrande) |
| Casual meal | $3 to $6 | $4 to $7 local, $18 to $35 tourist zones |
| Utilities including AC | $50 to $100 | $110 to $220 on electricity alone |
| Comfortable monthly total | $1,200 to $1,800 | $1,600 to $2,500 |
The reason for the big difference is the impact of mass tourism.
Cartagena took in 2.4 million visitors last year and that pricing works its way into everything, including the things residents buy.
Santa Marta’s tourism is mostly Colombian and mostly seasonal, so the two-tier pricing is milder. You’ll still get quoted gringo prices here; you just won’t get quoted them for groceries.
Where Cartagena wins
Flights are the biggest win for Cartagena. Rafael Núñez International Airport has direct international routes. While Santa Marta’s airport is 15 minutes from my apartment, almost everything connects through Bogotá, Medellín or Panama City so I need to add half a day each way.
The restaurant scene is not close either. Cartagena has world-class serious chefs and Santa Marta has good seafood and a lot of the same menu repeated along the beach.
The expat community is bigger, older and more established in Cartagena. There are more coworking spaces, more English spoken, and more of the infrastructure that makes a soft landing possible if your Spanish is weak. Around 35 to 40 percent of Cartagena property transactions involve foreign buyers, which tells you how internationally wired the city is.
And the walled city is genuinely one of the best places to walk around in Latin America, at least between about 6pm and midnight when the heat lets up.
The beach lifestyle goes the other way
This is the part that I find surprises people.
Cartagena is famous for beaches but it doesn’t really have any good ones. The city beaches are grey and silty. To get proper Caribbean water, you have to take a boat to the Rosario Islands or Playa Blanca, which means a day trip, a boat fee, and arriving somewhere already full of other day trippers.
I can walk to Playa El Rodadero. It’s the beach Colombians actually holiday on, clean water in a protected bay, and it’s ten minutes from the historic centre.
Beyond that, Taganga is 20 minutes away for world-class diving. Tayrona National Park is 45 minutes east and has picture-perfect beaches like Cabo San Juan, La Piscina, Playa Cinto and Playa Cristal. Palomino, with the river tubing and surfing, is 90 minutes away. I regularly hike from El Rodadero to Playa Inca Inca for a sunset swim and it takes 45 minutes on foot.
None of that requires a boat or a booking ahead so the beach lifestyle wins big in Santa Marta.
The Caribbean heat and the escape valve
Both cities are hot but Cartagena is hotter and more humid, averaging 29 to 35 degrees, and the humidity sits on you in a way that Santa Marta’s doesn’t because we get La Brisa Loca coming off the mountains most afternoons.
But the real difference is that Cartagena has nowhere to go to escape the heat and humidity. It’s flat, it’s at sea level, and the nearest cool air is a flight away.
The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta starts where the city ends. Minca is 45 minutes up the hill and sits at 600 to 900 metres. Cerro Kennedy gets you into cloud forest at Medellín’s elevation, cold enough for a blanket at night. It’s a great place to explore coffee farms, swim in waterfalls, and learn to identify the 19 endemic bird species in the area.
When the coast gets too much in March, I go up the mountain for a few days. That option doesn’t exist in Cartagena and I think it matters more than people expect over a long stay.
Buying is where Santa Marta saves you a lot of money
If you’re thinking about owning something, the numbers stop being close when it comes to buying real estate in Santa Marta.
Cartagena’s median is around COP 9 million per square metre, about $2,195 USD. Bocagrande and Castillogrande, the beachfront corridor, run from COP 13 to 28 million per square metre, so $3,500 to $7,500. The typical Bocagrande and Castillogrande units start at $190,000 to $1.09 million. Restored places inside the walls start around $439,000.
Beachfront condos in Santa Marta start at $80,000 to $120,000. Inland apartments in good areas are $50,000 to $80,000. Ocean-view luxury is $150,000 to $300,000.
So the entry price for owning something on the Caribbean here is roughly what a small Bocagrande unit costs before you’ve negotiated. Same sea and same coastline, just four hours apart.
Foreigners buy with the same rights as Colombians in either city, no permit and no residency required. Closing costs run 2 to 3 percent and the process takes four to eight weeks. Get an inspector and a bilingual attorney regardless of which city you choose, because salt air is hard on buildings and build quality varies.
Cartagena will probably appreciate faster. It’s the more established market with more foreign money in it. If you’re buying purely as an investment with a manager handling short-term rentals, that’s a real argument for Cartagena.
If you’re buying somewhere to live, your money goes about three times as far in Santa Marta.
Pick Cartagena if you want an international destination
You want the architecture and the restaurants. You fly internationally often enough that connections through Bogotá would wear you down. You want a larger, more established foreign community and more English around you. You’re investing rather than living, and you want the market with the deeper buyer pool.
Pick Santa Marta if you a beach and mountain lifestyle
You want to swim in the sea most days without booking a boat. You want mountains within an hour of the beach. You’re buying and you want the property to cost less than the flights you’ll take to visit it. You’d rather live in a working Colombian city than a heritage site with a city attached.
I usually go to Cartagena once a year and I always enjoy it. Then I come back to Santa Marta, where the beach is a five-minute walk, lunch costs four dollars, and the mountains are almost on my doorstep when the heat gets old.
Spend a month in each before you decide anything. Stay in Bocagrande in Cartagena and El Rodadero here, not the historic centres, because in both cities the old town is where you visit and not where you live.
If you want somewhere in El Rodadero that already has the fast internet sorted and people to eat dinner with, that’s what we built.
He runs a cultural ecotourism company called Sacred Treks, where he ran some retreats in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and fell in love with this area of Colombia.
You can follow him on Instagram @kaaist
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