Free Tour Cartagena — Local services in Cartagena

We loved learning about Cartagena on the free walking tour! The Yellow Umbrella tour guides were awesome, they knew so much about the history, art, and culture and were happy to interact and make the tour feel very personalized and special.

We took 2 tours on our first full day in the city. We took the walking the tour of the Old City with Christian in the morning, and the Getsemani walking tour in the afternoon with Luis. I highly recommend both of these tours! Christian and Luis were amazing tour guides!

During the Old City tour we learned about the history of the walled city, including the Spanish colonizers, Inquisition, the slave trade and subsequent free communities (Palenques), pirates, the fight for independence (Simon Bolivar), and mix of cultures and traditions that manifested in various foods and art forms. Christian explained so many details about the way the city was designed and how it had changed through history. He also made sure we weren't interrupted by too many street vendors selling various things (but we did fall behind the group for a couple minutes to listen to some rappers who had pretty good flow)!

In the afternoon we met Luis in the park to start the Getsemani tour. He is super friendly and full of energy. You can tell he really loves teaching people about his neighborhood and preserving the artistic culture. We learned about the significance of many breathtaking murals from depictions of Gabriel García Márquez to women revolutionaries, the natural beauty of underwater landscapes to the everyday activities of men playing dice and kids playing ball. We also loved getting the best local food and drink recommendations, including some tasting along the way!

Luis and Christian were wonderful guides, I hope they received a lot of tips because they provided a super valuable experience for free and really deserved large tips! I would recommend the Yellow Umbrella Free Walking Tours 100%, it was as good or better than other tours we took that cost hundreds of dollars....

I don't recommend this one. This is not a great tour (and we did many walking tours in Colombia). It takes you to a few squares in the old city but the information you get in each of them is often lacking, missing, or clearly inaccurate. The guide, which was quite awkward (part of it was the language barrier), tried to over dramatize the history of the city in a way that was quite silly at times and made it difficult to know facts from fiction. For example, Francis Drake did not burn the city down just because he found a letter calling him a pirate, which offended him as an Englishman. There were dozens of examples like that (some of the reviews here make me suspect that some people actually believe the fictional history we were reputedly told on this tour). In other places the guide just did not do a good job. We stopped at a square and he asked "Who knows who is the most famous Columbian artist?" When someone answers "Botero" he says "you're right" and moves on, but forgets to point out that there is a Botero sculpture in the other corner of the square. Our tour was on 12/24 and multiple folks asked him what is there to do in town on Christmas. A trivial question, right? He said he didn't know and maybe there would not be much because of "the situation" (I think he meant COVID). In any event that was absurd. The city had dozen of events and parties during Christmas and we could have seen them preparing them during the tour. The tour was at 10am, which is super hot, which also made it difficult for everyone (including the guide). It might be better to take the tour (if at all) in the afternoon. Overall, the old city is nice but you can probably see it on your own just as well...

Cannot recommend this walking tour enough! Edgar was our guide in April 2025, he was extremely knowledgeable about the historical and cultural significance of the landmarks we saw, in addition to explaining the global relational significance based on the home cities of the tourists in our group. It was incredible. We saw many tour groups and guides moving through Cartagena, but I am certain that our tour with this guide group was superior. We were in a smaller group, no megaphone/loudspeaker required, which gave us the opportunity to interact with our guide and the rest of the group in a much more meaningful way. The tour was NOT just a highlights reel for tourist friendly parts of Cartegena. Culture, race, poverty, the politics of tourism, etc. were all included in the subject matter. My family took this tour on the first full day of our weeklong stay in Cartagena and we were able to move comfortably through the Walled City and Getsemani neighborhoods throughout the rest of our stay due in large part to participating in this tour....