The best time to visit Cartagena, month by month

Key Takeaways

• December to April is dry and sunny. It is the best time to visit Cartagena and the busiest.
• The heat is a constant, not a season: average maximums run 30.5°C to 31.6°C every month.
• October is the wet peak, with 12 days of rain against 0.1 days in February.
• Sunshine is the real seasonal variable: 9.1 hours a day in January against 5.5 in October.
• Humidity never drops: between 78% and 82% all year, so plan the walking for the morning in any month.

The best time to visit Cartagena, in short

December to April. The dry season on the Colombian Caribbean is unusually dry, the sun is out for most of the day, and the walled city is at its most pleasant to be in on foot.

That is also the high season, and it holds Christmas, New Year and Holy Week, which are the three weeks of the year when the old city is genuinely full and accommodation is priced for it.

The alternative is the wet half, May to November. It is cheaper and quieter, and it is more workable than the rainfall figures suggest. What it is not is cooler.

The heat does not change. The rain does

This is the part that surprises people, and it comes straight out of the official climate normals for the city’s own airport station.

Average maximum temperatures at Rafael Núñez run from 30.5°C in January to 31.6°C in June and August. That is a spread of about one degree across an entire year. There is no cool season in Cartagena. There is no month where you will want a jacket.

Humidity is the same story: the normals put it between 78% and 82% year-round.

So “when should I go” is not a question about temperature here, the way it is in Buenos Aires or Cusco. It is a question about two things only: how much rain you are willing to risk, and how many hours of sun you want.

December to April: the dry months

The numbers behind the dry season are stark. February averages 0.4 mm of rain and January 4.4 mm, against an annual total of 1,026 mm. Almost none of the year’s rain falls in this window.

Sunshine peaks with it, at 9.1 hours a day in January.

That combination is what the postcards are made of, and it is why this is the stretch that sells out. If the trip is built around the Caribbean, the islands and long days outdoors, this is the window and it is worth booking early.

The trade is crowds and price, concentrated hard into the holiday weeks.

May to November: the wet half, and what it is actually like

The wet season is real but it is not a washout, and the shape of it matters.

October is the peak by a distance: 238.5 mm across 12 rain days. September and August are the next wettest. But even in October, 12 rain days means roughly two days in three have no measurable rain at all, and Caribbean rain tends to arrive as a heavy afternoon burst rather than a grey day.

What you lose is sunshine hours, down to 5.5 a day in October from 9.1 in January. The light is flatter and the sky is often cloudy in a way the dry season never is.

What you gain is a city that is not full, and prices to match. For a trip built around the old town, the food and the history rather than the beach, that is a good trade.

The best time to visit Cartagena for walking the old city

Almost everything worth doing here is done on foot, in the sun, and the tours are built that way. That makes the time of day matter as much as the month.

Our Best of Cartagena Walking Tour runs three hours at US$70 per person, and the Getsemaní and San Felipe Castle Historical Walking Tour is the same price and length through the fortress and the neighbourhood behind it. San Felipe in particular is open stone with very little shade.

In any month, take those in the morning. In the dry season the reason is the sun; in the wet season it is that the afternoon is when the rain arrives. The answer happens to be the same all year.

What it costs, and what to book ahead

Cartagena prices its guiding flat across the year. The four walking tours in our catalogue are all US$70 per person, whether you take them in February or September, and the airport transfer is US$30 per group either way.

What moves with the season is the hotel, and in the holiday weeks it moves a lot. If the dates are fixed to Christmas, New Year or Holy Week, book accommodation first and fit everything else around it. Outside those weeks, the city is easy to arrange late.

One more thing worth knowing if Cartagena is part of a longer trip. Its dry season, December to April, is the opposite of Rio de Janeiro’s, which is wettest over exactly those months, and it overlaps neatly with the dry season in Peru’s coast. A January route through Cartagena and Lima gets both at their best; a January route through Cartagena and Rio gets one of each.

For how to spread the days once you are there, see our guide on how many days in Cartagena, and the Cartagena page for what there is to see.