Exploring Cartagena: Mercado Bazurto

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The Mercado Bazurto is a 24-hour indoor-outdoor market in Cartagena. Large and small stalls sell anything from fresh meat and fish to fruits, vegetables, blenders, and rat traps. We had heard about it from watching some travel shows about Cartagena; I think Anthony Bourdain ate here. It is a true local market, and I we were the only tourists that I saw while there. This is where the locals do some of their real shopping, and it reminded me of some of the souks in the Middle East and Asia – a dizzying maze and an assault of the senses.

Nine of us shared two taxis from our air bnb to the Mercado Bazurto, but we split up when we arrived. Ryan and I took off and wandered the unsigned alleys and dusty outdoor stalls. We stopped and got some freshly fried dough treats; I’m not sure what they were, but they were yummy!

The market was roughly laid out with a fruit/vegetable area, a meat/fish area, and clothing/electronics area, but generally it was more or less a jumble of unsigned stores in unlabeled alleys. I finally succumbed and bought myself a little cup of fresh limeade from one of the traveling vendors that had a giant glass tank of the freshly squeezed juiced.

The market is open 24 hours but some vendors were randomly closed. The indoor part of the market seemed to be a collection of warehouses and buildings cobbled together with no open spaces.

We saw tons of foods that I didn’t recognize, and I’m not sure if the above photo is of culinary or medicinal herbs, or even teas. No idea!

The lighting wasn’t very good in the warren of shops, so some of my snaps are blurry and dark. However, you can see the rough market stands and random shelter from the sun. The pathways were rough as well, some paved but not maintained in decades, some just open dirt. As we have heard, this is not a ‘beginners’ market!

The Mercado Bazurto borders a busy street full of traffic, and is surrounded by what we call ‘stores with doors,’ that is, stores that have doors and air conditioning. A lot of these were shops that sold clothing, phones, electronics, and home wares. Of course there were luxury brand fakes, like Chanel shoes and Polo tops, which totally reminded me of my childhood trips to Southeast Asia. I had grown up only ever seeing the fakes, so when I saw real Louis Vuitton and Chanel in North America, I thought all the pieces looked really cheesy!

If this fruit was anything like what the vendors sold outside our airbnb, it would be fresh and perfectly ripe, bursting with flavour and juices. From my work and previous travels, I am well experienced when it comes to food. However, I didn’t even recognize some of the items we saw at the market!

The fish market area had super fresh fish displayed and ready for sale. If we had been heading directly back to our air bnb, I would have insisted on buying some for lunch! The fishmongers would scale the fish at their stalls, so those little clear discs littered the ground. As you can see, none of it is refrigerated, but this isn’t the kind of market where food would sit for days like in a grocery store.

During our wandering, I could tell we were near the meat market by the smell – I suddenly got a whiff of what reminded me of our Oma’s village (she lived two doors down from a pig farm). And sure enough, I followed my nose and looked over at freshly butchered meat.

The Mercado Bazurto is a busy, chaotic, and at some points claustrophobic market. One part of the market sold household items, and we could see dozens of fan and blender replacement parts and accessories. From Donatello’s cooking and spending time with his parents, Colombians love fresh juices made in a blender. It was good to see that there seemed to be a great amount of appliances that were able to be fixed, instead of just thrown out and replaced like in North America. We also saw a lot of homemade mouse and massive rat traps…although I ‘m glad we didn’t see any rats in person!