Palacio de la Inquisición

The Palace of the Inquisition is the most historically significant colonial building in Cartagena — a Baroque palace on Plaza de Bolívar that served as the headquarters of the Spanish Inquisition in New Granada from 1610 to 1821. The museum inside documents the Inquisition's activities in Cartagena — the trials, the punishments, and the auto-da-fé (public sentencing ceremonies) that were performed in the plaza outside — with a directness that makes the building's beautiful architecture feel uncomfortable, which is the correct emotional response.

The collection includes instruments of torture (the rack, the water torture device, the garrucha pulley system), trial records, and the Baroque portal that is considered the finest piece of colonial stonework in the city. The courtyard — where accused heretics, witches, and Jews were held before trial — is now a peaceful garden, and the transition from the street's cheerful commerce to the museum's documented cruelty provides one of Cartagena's most jarring historical encounters.

The Inquisition in Cartagena was particularly concerned with enslaved Africans who practised non-Christian religions and with the conversos (Jews who had converted to Christianity but were suspected of secretly maintaining Jewish practices) who had fled Spain to the colonies. The museum's treatment of this history adds the religious-persecution dimension to Cartagena's colonial story that the architecture alone can't convey.