September 12, 2026
The Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas is the fort on the hill of San Lázaro, a kilometer east of the walled city of Cartagena, and the building UNESCO singles out by name inside what it calls the most extensive system of military fortifications in South America. It began in 1657 as a small triangular fort with twenty soldiers in it, fell to a French fleet in 1697, held against a British expedition of 26,000 men and more than 170 sail in 1741, and was then rebuilt by the engineer Antonio de Arévalo into the mountain of ramps, batteries and tunnels you climb today, with 63 cannons and underground barracks for 350 men. We take travelers there on our city tour and on our Getsemaní walk, so this is the guide we give them before they go: what the castle is, how it was built and by whom, what happened in 1741, the fort battery by battery, the 2026 ticket and the hours under the operator’s own resolution, the visit hour by hour, the rules, and the one piece of advice that matters more than any of it, which is the hour you arrive.
The short version
Go at seven in the morning, when it opens and the ramps are still in shade; by mid-morning the stone is hot and the tunnels fill. The ticket in 2026 is 38,000 pesos for a foreign adult, 33,000 for Colombians, 16,000 for children from six to thirteen and for students and teachers, free under six and for Colombians over 62, and it does not include a guide, who is hired at the ticket office or brought with you. Allow an hour to an hour and a quarter: the ramp, the batteries on the way up, the tunnels, and the top. Wear shoes you can climb steep ramps in, carry water, and do not climb on the walls. It is 1,080 meters from the Puerta del Reloj and 740 from the Plaza de la Trinidad in Getsemaní, so it belongs to the same morning as either. It is worth it, and it is worth it more with someone who can tell you which battery you are standing on and why it points where it points.
What the castle is, by UNESCO and by the operator
Cartagena’s walls, forts and monuments were inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1984, 192.32 hectares under the name Port, Fortresses and Group of Monuments, Cartagena, for being, in UNESCO’s words, the most extensive and one of the most complete systems of military fortifications in South America and an eminent example of the military architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; the description names the “formidable Castillo San Felipe de Barajas” on its rocky crag dominating the city to the east and protecting the access to the isthmus of El Cabrero, and it names the engineers, Antonelli, Herrera y Sotomayor, Arévalo, Sala and MacEvan, two of whom you will meet below. The Instituto Cervantes’ guide to the city calls it the most outstanding work of Spanish military engineering in the Americas. The castle is run by the Escuela Taller Cartagena de Indias, the Etcar, which publishes its hours, its tariff and its rules, and whose own history pages are the source for most of what follows. The hill it stands on, the Cerro de San Lázaro, rises 40 meters by the operator’s figure, which does not sound like much until you are on the ramp at noon.
How it was built, in three centuries
The operator’s account starts with a problem of geometry: once the old town and the arrabal of Getsemaní were walled, the hill of San Lázaro still overlooked both the walls and the only land entrance to the city, the Puerta de la Media Luna in Getsemaní, and an enemy on its summit could shell the city at leisure. In 1639 the governor Melchor de Aguilera saw the need to put a small fort, a bonete, on the top, and entrusted the design to the master Juan Mejía del Valle by the Instituto Cervantes’ account, but money and paperwork stopped it; a royal decree of September 20, 1647 ordered the work, and the first Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas was finished on October 12, 1657 under the governor Pedro Zapata, who named it for King Philip IV and for the Counts of Barajas, the title of his own ancestors. It was designed by the Dutch engineer Ricardo Carr and built by the master builder Gaspar Mejía: a small triangular fort with three half-bastions, four sentry boxes, a well, a barracks, a store and a gate on its west side, with a garrison of twenty soldiers and four gunners, and eight cannons by one of the operator’s pages and fifteen by another. That was the fort the French baron de Pointis attacked and took on April 20, 1697, before sacking the city, and the lesson was learned slowly: a troop barracks, a powder magazine and a main gate with a drawbridge in 1715, a covered palisade halfway up the hill by the engineer Juan de Herrera y Sotomayor in 1724, the castellan’s house in 1728 to 1730, delayed for lack of funds, and in 1739 a hornwork of fascines with a covered way and a glacis on the north slope, plus works down at the beach of San Lázaro. Then came 1741, which has its own section below. After it, by the operator’s honest phrase, San Felipe was still not unconquerable; the British had simply rushed its best-defended flank. When war resumed in 1762 and England took Havana, Antonio de Arévalo was ordered to make the hill what it is now, and between 1762 and 1769 he built the collateral batteries that step down its sides, a system of galleries and passages, underground barracks for 350 men, cisterns for a siege and a gallery at sea level with branches for explosives, so that the whole hill could be mined from inside if it fell. Between 1769 and 1780 batteries were added on the neighboring Cerro de la Popa to cross fire with the castle against an attack from the Playón Grande below it. Demolition and reconstruction were proposed repeatedly in the late eighteenth century and never carried out, for cost and for want of a reason. After independence the castle lost its purpose, was overgrown, surrounded by private houses and used as a quarry for decades, and nearly disappeared; its title passed to the Republic of Colombia on August 22, 1887, and in 1928 the Sociedad de Mejoras Públicas commissioned Carlos Crismatt to restore it. UNESCO’s inscription came in 1984.
The fort, battery by battery
What you climb is Arévalo’s work wrapped around Carr’s. The operator’s page on the parts of the castle gives each battery its guns and its job, and this is the list to carry up the ramp. The Batería de San Lázaro, on the south side, covered the approach from the beach of San Lázaro with five cannons; it was first thrown up in fascines around 1739 by Herrera y Sotomayor and rebuilt by Arévalo between 1762 and 1769 with three cisterns holding 72,000 rations of water each. The Batería de Santa Bárbara, from about 1762, carried seven cannons aimed at the Cerro de la Popa. The Batería de La Redención, between La Cruz and Santa Bárbara, defended the approach from El Cabrero with eleven. The Batería del Hornabeque, on the north, had six, begun by Herrera y Sotomayor in 1739 and finished by Arévalo. The Batería de San Carlos y Los Apóstoles, also on the north side, had thirteen and was the most powerful of them all. The Batería de La Cruz, facing northwest, had eight. Sixty-three cannons of different firepower in all, by the operator’s count, on a hill whose walls, in the Instituto Cervantes’ description, rise from very broad bases and narrow toward the parapets, and whose batteries do not point at the city but cover one another, so that no battery could be taken without taking the whole system. The same guide records what the fort is made of and how: blocks of coral limestone said to have been cut from the reefs of the nearby coast and carried up the hill by enslaved men, in a city that was itself a slave port, bonded with a mortar of lime and ox blood; the legend says the blood of slaves as well, and the engineers who work on the fort today say blood went only into the cisterns and the other works that had to be waterproof. The walls were built leaning inward so that cannonballs would glance off; the slopes had gullies to trap anyone climbing them; there were cisterns and deep ditches, tunnels to move unseen, the barracks underground and stores for months of siege.
1741, the siege that made the fort
The Instituto Cervantes gives the numbers and the operator gives the shape of it. In 1741 the British admiral Edward Vernon came against Cartagena with 26,000 men and more than 170 sail, so sure of the result that 35 medals had been struck in advance, some showing the commander of Cartagena on his knees handing over his sword, others with the legend “I took Cartagena”. For more than a month he besieged the city and the bay, took the forts of Bocachica at its mouth and some of the works of the inner bay, and then chose to storm San Felipe, and chose its strongest flank; the assault broke on the slopes of the hill, disease was eating his army, and he left. The defense was led by Blas de Lezo, who had already lost an eye, a leg and an arm in other wars and is the city’s hero for it. The operator’s history page calls the defeat of Vernon’s army on the slopes of the hill a milestone in the history of Cartagena, and then, on the next page, says the thing most guides leave out: the fort was not unconquerable, the British had attacked in a hurry on the best-defended side, and it was that near miss, not the victory, that produced Arévalo’s rebuilding twenty years later. The medals are the detail visitors remember; the rebuilding is the one that explains what they are standing on.
“The impregnable”, and the fort that actually fell
The operator’s visitor page calls the castle el inexpugnable and says that although it suffered several attacks by the enemies of the Spanish crown it was never taken. Its own history pages record that the baron de Pointis attacked and took San Felipe on April 20, 1697. Both are true of different forts: the small bonete of 1657 fell, and the hill that Arévalo built around it after 1762 was never stormed. We tell you both because a guide who says “never taken” will be corrected by the operator’s own website, and because the 1697 defeat is the reason the 1741 defense and the 1762 rebuilding happened at all.
The 2026 ticket and the hours
The castle opens every day of the week from 7 in the morning to 6 in the evening. The tariff is the operator’s Resolución 005 of January 9, 2026: the full ticket is 38,000 pesos; Colombians pay 33,000 on showing a physical or digital cédula or a cédula de extranjería; children from six to thirteen with an identity document, and students and teachers of Colombian institutions with a current credential, pay 16,000; the educational program for school groups of twenty to forty is 32,000 per student and official Colombian schools pay 2,000 with five working days’ notice. Entrance is free for children under six, for Colombians over 62 with their cédula, for people with a disability and one companion, for military reservists and national heroes and for the beneficiaries of Law 1699, and the operator admits Colombians free on the last Sunday of each month except January and December; its free-days calendar page, when we checked it, still carried a suspension notice from the pandemic and no 2026 dates, so ask at the gate rather than planning a trip around it. The ticket does not include a guide; the operator says guides can be hired at the fort’s ticket office, and ours come with you. Tickets are sold at the gate and through the operator’s online shop.
The visit, hour by hour
The entrance is at the foot of the hill on the Avenida Antonio Arévalo, in the sector the operator calls Pie del Cerro, ten minutes by car from the clock tower by its own estimate and a quarter of an hour on foot by ours. From the gate a long ramp climbs the flank of the hill past the lower batteries; this is where you want shade, and at seven you have it. The batteries come one after another, each a terrace of stone with its embrasures, and the point of going with someone who knows them is that they look alike and are not: the guns of La Redención face El Cabrero, Santa Bárbara’s faced La Popa, and the reason is the map of 1741. The tunnels are the galleries Arévalo cut through the hill so the garrison could move unseen and, if the fort fell, blow it from inside, passages that are steep and low in places and that our city tour describes as acoustic listening passages and explosive chambers; the operator’s own warning is that they can be slippery, and they are. Then the top, the bonete of 1657 with its sentry boxes, and the view that is the reason the hill was fortified: the walled city and the bay to the west, the towers of Bocagrande to the southwest, and La Popa on its higher hill to the east. On our city tour the fort takes 75 minutes; on the Getsemaní walk it takes an hour after the neighborhood’s murals. Alone, with the operator’s rules and a bottle of water, allow the same.
With us
Our private city tour is six and a half hours from your hotel in the Centro Histórico, Getsemaní, Bocagrande, Castillogrande or El Laguito: 75 minutes at the castle with the ticket included, then the walled city plaza by plaza, Getsemaní with an arepa de huevo and a coconut water, and the Convento de la Popa on the option that includes it, with a certified bilingual guide and private transport, from 158 US dollars per person for two travelers. Our Getsemaní and San Felipe walk is three hours on foot from the Plaza de la Trinidad, in English or Spanish, the murals and the plaza first and then an hour in the fort, the tunnels and the lookouts, from 55 US dollars per person for two; the castle ticket is bought at the gate or in advance, and we confirm the arrangement when you book.
The rules, from the operator
The Etcar publishes its recommendations for all the fortifications, and they are short. The places you are visiting belong to the Colombian people and to you, so protect them; litter goes only in the bins; smoking only in the open areas; animals are barred except guide dogs; the heat can be intense, especially in the middle of the day, so drink water on the way round; wear comfortable clothes and shoes, because some of the forts have steep ramps and stairs; climbing the walls is dangerous and damages the heritage; and the tunnels can be slippery. To that we add two of our own: go at seven, and take the tunnels slowly.
Getting there
From the Puerta del Reloj it is 1,080 meters by the coordinates, out through Getsemaní and past the India Catalina roundabout to the foot of the hill, a quarter of an hour on foot in the early morning and a taxi ride of a few minutes at any other hour; from the Plaza de la Trinidad in Getsemaní it is 740 meters, which is why our walk pairs the two. The operator puts it at ten minutes by car from the Torre del Reloj, fifteen from the Rafael Núñez airport and twenty from the bus terminal, and there are two parking areas, on the Avenida Antonio Arévalo and on the Calle 31, if you come with a car. The Convento de la Popa, on the higher hill behind, is a separate visit and a separate ticket; how the two fit into a day, with the walled city and Getsemaní, is in our guide to things to do in Cartagena, and the neighborhood at the castle’s feet is in our Getsemaní guide.
Is it worth it?
Yes, without qualification, and in our experience it is the one sight in Cartagena where the order of the morning decides the experience: at seven it is a fort, with the ramps in shade, the tunnels cool and the bay silver below; at eleven it is a hot hill with a queue in it. Its value is not the view, though the view is good; it is that the whole eighteenth-century idea of the city, the walls, the bay forts, La Popa’s batteries and this hill covering one another, can be understood from one place in an hour, and that the hill itself is the argument. Give it an hour with someone who can read it, and then go and eat.
Questions travelers ask
What is the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas?
The Spanish fort on the hill of San Lázaro, a kilometer east of Cartagena’s walled city, begun in 1657 and rebuilt between 1762 and 1769 by Antonio de Arévalo into a hill of batteries, tunnels and underground barracks with 63 cannons; part of the World Heritage site inscribed by UNESCO in 1984.
How much does the Castillo de San Felipe cost in 2026?
38,000 pesos for a foreign adult, 33,000 for Colombians, 16,000 for children from six to thirteen and for students and teachers with ID, and free for children under six, Colombians over 62, and people with a disability with one companion, under the operator’s Resolución 005 of January 9, 2026. A guide is not included.
What are the opening hours?
Every day from 7 in the morning to 6 in the evening. Go at seven.
Was the Castillo de San Felipe ever taken?
The first fort, finished in 1657, was taken by the French baron de Pointis on April 20, 1697. The fort held against Edward Vernon in 1741, and the hill Arévalo rebuilt after 1762 was never stormed; the operator’s “never taken” refers to that.
How long does the visit take?
An hour to an hour and a quarter for the ramp, the batteries, the tunnels and the top. Our city tour gives it 75 minutes and our Getsemaní walk an hour.
Can you visit the tunnels?
Yes; they are part of the normal visit. They are steep, low in places and, by the operator’s own warning, can be slippery.
Is the castle suitable for children and older visitors?
Children from six to thirteen pay the reduced ticket and under six go free; the ramps are long and steep and the tunnels are low, so it is a morning visit for anyone, early and with water, and not a place for a stroller.
Plan it with us
The castle is the first stop of our city tour and the second half of our Getsemaní walk, and both start early for the reason this page keeps repeating. The rest of the city, from the walled center to the islands, is in our Cartagena travel guide, and every tour we run there is on our Cartagena tours page. Write to us on WhatsApp with your dates and your hotel, or start with the rest of our Colombia guides.
Sources
The facts on this page were checked on September 12, 2026 against the following sources: the Escuela Taller Cartagena de Indias’ pages on the bonete of 1657, the reconstruction and expansion, Vernon’s attack of 1741, San Felipe after Vernon, the parts of the castle and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, its visitor page for the hours, the 2026 tariff and the “inexpugnable” line, and its recommendations; UNESCO’s file on the Port, Fortresses and Group of Monuments, Cartagena; the Instituto Cervantes’ guide to the castle for 1639, the numbers of 1741, the medals, Blas de Lezo and the construction; our city tour page and our Getsemaní and San Felipe walk for the programs and prices, read today. Distances are calculated from coordinates.
