Café Havana & Salsa Culture

Café Havana is Cartagena's most famous bar — a live-music venue on the corner of Getsemaní's two main streets that has been the epicentre of the city's salsa scene since it opened and has hosted everyone from Hillary Clinton to the backpackers who discover that salsa dancing in Cartagena is not an optional activity but a social requirement.

The bar plays live salsa and Cuban son Thursday through Saturday nights, and the dance floor — a small, packed space surrounded by tables and the bar — provides the kind of intimate, sweaty, musically excellent experience that large salsa venues can't replicate. The crowd is a mix of Colombians and tourists, and the social convention is straightforward: if someone asks you to dance, you dance, regardless of your skill level.

Cartagena's salsa culture extends well beyond Café Havana — the champeta music (an Afro-Caribbean genre unique to Colombia's Caribbean coast, mixing African rhythms with Caribbean and electronic influences) plays in the sound systems of Getsemaní's bars and the picós (mobile sound systems) that animate street parties. The combination of salsa, champeta, vallenato, and reggaetón creates a musical landscape that is the most diverse and energetic in Colombia.