In all three neighborhoods, the streets are generally wide enough for a car and a half. Private houses are built right to the curb. A security cage of wooden spindles lets the breeze and gossip pass through the windows, and sometimes a cat. One afternoon, Willy and I walk down Calle de Don Sancho, an elegant street in El Centro that leads to the plaza in front of the theater. An old man in nothing but a pair of shorts is leaning against his window, his hand propping up his chin. Several hours later, when we pass his house again, he remains in the same spot, undisturbed.

The houses everywhere, whether modest or grand, keep the street out with a wooden gate that has a smaller door cut into it. Bronze buttons sometimes decorate the gates. "The more buttons, the more money," Willy explains.

It's at these gates that Cartagena's two sides meet. There's the life on the street—the men and women with pushcarts, the students flirting in the shade of a rubber tree, the businessmen in a hurry, the priests and nuns cool in short sleeves, the tourists (still mostly from Colombia and other parts of Latin America) taking it all in; Willy's Cartagena thriving on the curb. And then there's the life behind the gates. It's impossible not to wonder what's inside the mansions and palaces and private homes, where the courtyard fountains overtake the vendors' cries.

If Willy is the unofficial mayor of Cartagena's streets, then Teresita Román de Zurek presides over the life behind its gates. She is one of the city's grandes dames, the matriarch of its most prominent family, and Cartagena's honorary mayor—a title given her for her many civic contributions, including a best-selling cookbook on the local cuisine, and her leadership in returning horse-drawn carriages to the city center. (A friend of mine correctly points out that the horses' canter on the pavement sounds like Cartagena-Cartagena-Cartagena.)

Teresita lives behind the gates of Casa Román, possibly Cartagena's most famous private home. It's an extravagant nineteenth-century Moorish fantasy whose arched windows are copied directly from the Alhambra. The house is built around a tiled courtyard, and doors lead to sitting rooms and bedrooms. Teresita was born in this house some eighty years ago (it seems rude to ask the precise date). She is a handsome, stately woman with well-coiffed reddish-brown hair. Her earrings are two large hunks of lapis lazuli. Teresita comes from a family of famous chemists who emigrated from Spain in the early nineteenth century. The first Román in South America washed up near Cartagena's beach after his Lima-bound ship went down. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Románs have held positions of prominence in the city for almost two hundred years. A nephew is the former mayor. Her father invented Kola Román, an electric-pink soda popular throughout the region. Her cookbook features a number of recipes that use Kola Román imaginatively, including plantains marinated in Kola Román and Kola Román fruit cocktail. As Teresita is telling me about her recipes, her maid offers me an ice-cream soda made with Kola Román. It tastes like bubble gum.