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<\/a>If you saw my Facebook post, you have a pretty good idea of what we\u2019ve been up to, or at least me.\u00a0 Yesterday, we \u201chung\u201d around the Museum of the Inquisition, which was part of Spain\u2019s efforts to combat heresy everywhere.\u00a0 There were three offices in the New World (the others at Lima and Mexico City), that lasted as long as Spanish rule did.\u00a0 The head of the Inquisition had more power than either the governor-general, or the commandant, which surprised me.<\/p>\nYou could be hailed before the Inquisition for almost any kind of offense against the Church\u2014which included being Protestant or Jewish (a lot of Spanish Jews converted after Ferdinand and Isabella unified Spain, but still were suspect), blasphemous, having banned books (including Kant)\u2026and while there were a lot fewer incarcerations or deaths in Cartagena, the Inquisition lasted over 200 years.\u00a0 I put it in perspective of what I saw\/read about Roger Williams and the early years of the Massachusetts Bay colony, where there was also little tolerance for dissenters (and this was done by dissenters, who left England to practice their own religion).<\/p>\n
The museum has some suspicious instruments of torture. There\u2019s a guillotine, but that was not used.\u00a0 There\u2019s a gallows (hence the hanging I had the chance today to go on a tour to Santa Marta, about 200 miles up the coast (or as the Spanish called the north coast, Terra Firma). I went. Santa Marta predates the founding of Cartagena by about 6 years.\u00a0 The Spanish there found Indians with gold jewelry\u2014apparently gold is loose in the local river, which \u201csold\u201d the Spanish on the region.<\/p>\n The other site was the old town.\u00a0 To my dismay, the \u201cother site\u201d on the tour was a swim in the ocean.\u00a0 I was the only English speaker on the bus, and my nearly 60 year old Spanish might not get me through my high school class.\u00a0 The guide spoke no English, but one of the tourists (from the Dominican Republic) helped me convince the guide to get a cab to take me to the old section.\u00a0 The guide (who habla espanol only!) offered to come with and get me there and back.<\/p>\n I got out my English-Spanish dictionary and pointed out the word, \u201cworried.\u201d\u00a0 She understood that!<\/p>\n Feliz navidad and a merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" December 24, 2016 I\u2019m waiting for Santa, who is less apparent here than in Bloomington; perhaps he can\u2019t find a suit to suit this weather.\u00a0 This is no place for heavy winter clothing. If you saw my Facebook post, you have a pretty good idea of what we\u2019ve been up to, or at least me.\u00a0 … Continue reading “Cartagena visits”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1579","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arrival-cartagena-2016"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1579"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8403,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1579\/revisions\/8403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/factrack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>around comment), and that was used here, but the usual sentence of death was carried out by burning at the stake; that was presumed to be the only way to reclaim the lost soul.<\/p>\n<\/a> <\/a>There were two main sites I wanted to see.\u00a0 The first was where Simon Bolivar died.\u00a0 Bolivar, a Venezuelan, was one of the premier leaders in the insurrection which ended Spanish rule.\u00a0 He was born in Caracas, but helped free what are now six countries in northern South America.\u00a0 He died of tuberculosis at the age of 47.\u00a0 The estate of his friend had a major sugar cane plantation (for the making of rum, which was one element in the slave trade).\u00a0 The home is partly a shrine of Bolivar.\u00a0 It is also an arboretum, with a number of century old trees, not all of which are local; there\u2019s a huge fig tree of the type that I\u2019ve seen in Angkor Wat.\u00a0 There\u2019s also snakes in the arboretum, with a caveat not to go into the pristine areas since there are poisonous snakes waiting \u2026.<\/p>\n<\/a>I had about an hour and a half to wander what is a less upscale version of Cartagena (and totally without walls or fortresses), with a number of colonial houses, government buildings that date back to the colonial or early Republican period.\u00a0 All went well (though I was disappointed by the gold museum\u2014which had some Indian jewelry, and was in the former customs house) until it was time to leave.\u00a0 I went back to the Cathedral (supposedly the oldest in South America)<\/a> since the guide firmly said, \u201caqui, tres.\u201d\u00a0 \u201cTres\u201d came and went. Tres fifteen I started thinking about where I was going to spend the night or how I would get back to Cartagena. Finally, she appeared with her husband (the bus driver) ,\u00a0 laden with a shopping bag full of recent purchases.<\/p>\n