Hotel of the Week: François Catroux’s Final Hotel Project Reimagines a 16th-Century Franciscan Cloister
To create the Four Seasons Hotel and Residences Cartagena, a Beaux-Arts social club and four vanished movie palaces are stitched into Colombia’s most ambitious heritage property
For four centuries, the brick dome over the Ballroom de la Veracruz guarded a secret. When restorers climbed into the former Teatro Colón—raised over a Franciscan complex begun around 1555—they found a late-16th-century fresco under the plaster and the soot of a thousand double features. They didn’t cover it back up. That choice, more than any chandelier, sets the tone for the new Four Seasons Hotel and Residences Cartagena, which opened in in Getsemaní, the bohemian barrio outside the Walled City: a hotel built by digging as much as building, where the past keeps surfacing through the floor.
It is also a milestone for a city long shadowed by its country’s name. A generation ago, “Colombia” abroad meant cocaine, Escobar, and kidnapping, and Cartagena wore that along with everywhere else. No longer. Arrivals have roughly tripled since the mid-2000s, and a Four Seasons—which shows up only after the pioneers arrived—marks the moment a city stops being a discovery and becomes a destination.
The hotel group chose Getsemaní, the barrio where independence from Spain was plotted in 1811 and, for two centuries after, the working-class quarter concierges routed guests around—more domino tables than damask, the local champeta booming from doorways. Getsemaní’s walls carry murals by collectives like CapTagEna, and the property opens to those streets rather than turning from it, its eight sociable restaurants and bars embracing their vibrant surrounds.
Holding the rest together took formidable stitching. WATG, the Hawaiian firm behind luxury resorts in more than 170 countries, drew a scatter of half-ruined landmarks—the 16th-century San Francisco cloister and temple; the 1925 Club Cartagena by Gastón Lelarge, who had assisted Charles Garnier on the Paris Opéra; four dead movie theaters—into a single 131-key compound.
The digging was not a metaphor: archaeologists pulled the remains of monks, dignitaries, and others from beneath the old chapel floors. Some structures were restored from rubble; the sacred ones were eased back to life. The Cloister of Saint Francis is now an almost biblical courtyard of coral-stone columns and plastered arches, four banyans older than anyone under them dropping roots into the shade.
The interiors were the last work of François Catroux, the French decorator who put steel and plastic into grand rooms before it was chic, with a client list from the Rothschilds to David Geffen and almost never a hotel. He died in Paris in 2020, the furniture and fabrics already drawn; his protégé, François Bompard, of SBM Interior Design, finished the job with Wimberly Interiors and AvroKO.
The 27 colonial rooms go dark and devotional—iron-framed four-posters, carved mirrors in polychrome tile, a powder room sheathed in antique cementine the color of ochre and oxblood. The 104 contemporary rooms lighten to blond wood and a blue-and-sand palette. Off the lobby, the old club’s staircase rises to a Palladian half-moon window under a pitched glass roof, its risers in black-and-white mosaic—a domino run underfoot.
What saves the interiors from formulaic five-star gloss is the craft. Canvases by Colombian artist Miguel Cárdenas hang in both room categories; Alejandro Hernández shaped the plaster reliefs; Eloín Rivera, the self-taught Santander painter known for turning walls into jungles, spread a tropical canopy over The Grand Grill, Major Food Group’s New York steakhouse under alabaster light.
The furniture and textiles are Poli Mallarino’s, the grande dame of Colombian craft, who—like Catroux—did not live to see it finished. Even the menus are excavated: Pizzeria Della Chiesa keeps the name of the Veracruz chapel it sits on, and El Aljibe, the city’s first speakeasy, is named for the cistern unearthed beneath it.
Getsemaní is the other half of the stay, and the hotel knows how to open it. The concierge can charter a sloop to the Rosario Islands, the coral archipelago an hour offshore, or put guests in a private helicopter over the jungle-swallowed ruins of Ciudad Perdida and back in time for dinner. Closer in, a private graffiti walk through Getsemaní ends in a local artist’s own studio, and a salsa night at Café Havana—cumbia, champeta, a live band—is held for a private party.
Then again, the hotel gives visitors reasons never to leave the block: the monks’ old larder is the Umari spa now, six treatment rooms of rope loungers and hand-thrown vessels under a sage-green lattice, the oils pressed from Colombian plants and fruit. Bar Lelarge pours its signature Dorado beneath custom spirit shelving in the old club. Two rooftop pools look past the white dome of San Pedro Claver to the bay, gold at dusk. And for the guest who checks out reluctantly, there is a way not to—15 private residences cut from the same resurrected landmark, their interiors Catroux’s last work as well, waiting on the edge of the Walled City.
