What to buy in Cartagena: an honest shopping guide

A disclosure before anything else: we sell emeralds. Take the emerald section with that in mind, and judge the rest on its own.

Emeralds

Worth it, with conditions. Colombia is the source, the selection here is genuinely better than almost anywhere abroad, and prices are lower at origin. But the variance between stores is enormous, and the walled city has plenty of places selling lab-grown stones and heavily treated material without saying so. Buy where there is a certificate that names the treatment, and take your time.

Sombrero vueltiao

The black-and-white woven hat is genuinely Colombian, from the Córdoba and Sucre region. The quality measure is vueltas — the number of fiber strands woven per turn. Fifteen is common and inexpensive; nineteen, twenty-one and above are finer, more flexible and considerably more expensive. A hat that feels stiff and cheap probably is.

Wayuu bags

Handwoven by the Wayuu people of La Guajira. A single-thread mochila takes around three weeks to make. If you are offered one for a few dollars, it was made on a machine somewhere else. Look at the base: a genuine one is woven in a continuous spiral without seams.

Coffee

Buy it, but buy it from a roaster rather than a souvenir shop, and check the roast date rather than the packaging. Colombia exports most of its best beans, which is why the good coffee in Colombia is found in specialty shops and not in the supermarket.

Worth skipping

• Mass-produced leather goods sold as artisanal.
• Pre-Columbian style gold reproductions with no indication that they are reproductions.
• Anything a street seller insists is a once-only price for you specifically.

One general rule

In Cartagena, the price is almost never the problem. The problem is knowing what the thing is. For anything that costs real money, the test is whether the seller will put the description in writing, sign it, and still be at the same address next year.