Even during Colombia's darkest years, Cartagena was spared. David Ebershoff visits this dreamy city by the sea, a place that wears its rich history as lightly as it does its languorous charm

Willy Gutiérrez knows a lot of people in Cartagena. He walks around the city shaking hands. In the Plaza de Bolívar, the central square, he greets the shoeshine man, the man who makes limewater, and the woman advertising ten-cent calls on her mobile phone with a sign hung around her neck. In the Plaza de los Coches, site of the old slave market, he calls out to the newspaper boy, the coconut confectioner, and the palenquera, who sells watermelon and bananas from the enamel pan on her head. He knows the seven Jesuit priests who live in the former home of Saint Peter Claver, Cartagena's beloved saint, and the pair of teenage auxiliary police officers on duty outside the Gold Museum. The lady in a white cotton beret at the juice counter knows Willy so well that he doesn't need to place his order: watermelon shake, no straw. He knows many of the ticket takers hanging out of the commuter busetas and quite a few of the moto-taxi drivers who'll give you a lift around town for about seventy-five cents, helmet included. I can't walk a block with Willy before someone shouts "¡Hola, Willy!" Willy likes to think of himself as the mayor of the streets. If such a position existed in Cartagena, it would be hard to imagine anyone else getting the job.

I'm here to see how Colombia's long-running civil war has treated Cartagena, the languid, legendary colonial city on the Caribbean made familiar to many by Romancing the Stone or the fiction of Gabriel García Márquez, depending on one's point of reference. Cartagena's history is an amalgam of Spanish, native Indian, and African heritage. Catholicism has always been the dominant religion, but Jews, Muslims, and practitioners of the indigenous religions have had their influence as well. This diverse history presents itself in the faces of the roughly one million citizens, who are for the most part of mixed descent, and in its architecture, its percussion-heavy music, its very pace of life. It's a steamy, tropical city edged in by the sea and the mangrove swamps. The midday sun is cruel, the trade winds arrive only late in the afternoon, and the air is sleepy, lazy with the knowledge that the next day will be the same as today.

Since the early 1980s, Colombia has become synonymous, to American ears at least, with kidnappings, bombings, and cocaine. Guerrillas, paramilitary groups, narco-terrorists, gangs, thugs, cartels—even experts have had a hard time deciphering who is fighting whom and why. But there has been no mistaking the bloodiness. During the 1990s, according to the New York Times, approximately 35,000 people were killed in the ongoing civil war; that number goes much higher if you include those who died as a result of the criminal violence that overran many parts of the country. Another one to two million people were displaced.

But even in the bloodiest times, the violence never reached Cartagena's walls. Why not? It's a question I ask nearly everyone I talk to about the city. There are a lot of theories. Willy says it's because of the coral, brick, and quicklime walls that surround the historic center: Originally built by the Spanish, they've protected the city for hundreds of years. Former president Andreas Pastrana, who is the current Colombian ambassador to the United States, believes Colombians love the city too much to hurt it. "Cartagena is the symbol of Colombia," he says. "All Colombians take pride in it. During the years of violence, even the narco-traffickers respected it." A Wall Street analyst, who keeps a more jaundiced eye on Andean geopolitics for investors, jokes that even the terrorists needed a place to vacation. Others say it's the easygoing Caribbean lifestyle—political problems seem less urgent when you can go to the beach. Although that explanation sounds a bit flimsy, there's something to it. The difference between Bogotá and Cartagena is something like the difference between New York and Santa Barbara.