Convento de Santo Domingo, Cartagena

In 1531, two years after the first arrival of the Dominican friars to the shores of the so-called "New Kingdom of Granada" and following the method used of evangelization attached to the Conquest, a small group of them accompanied the conqueror Pedro of Heredia in its task of exploration of the region of Calamarí.

In June 1533, the city of Cartagena de Indias was founded, thought from the beginning as a city-port of great relevance for the colonizing task.

For this reason, the initial construction was not a big thing: a rustic house of straw and mud, with a chapel, in which, because of its fragility, "the Blessed Sacrament could not be had, especially because of the danger of fires" according to the documents.

Pedro Mártir Palomino, seeing the house threatening to ruin, entrusted to the friars doctrine, to take advantage of the preaching of Lent "to see if they could make some fruit with their sermons and get some alms to start the sumptuous building of our church and convent."

Two years later, the new convent only had the bases and religious offices continued to be held in temporary places; Meanwhile, the numerous friars managed to live in only seven table cells.

And although in 1596 the King ordered an aid of 5,000 pesos for the convent of Santo Domingo and the one of San Agustín, in 1623 the ceiling of the conventual church barely covered half of enclosure.

The large investment and long work produced a building not very attractive on the outside, as the chronicler Friar Alonso de Zamora, who described it at the beginning of the 18th century as a convent of "yellow facade; Those grate-like lattice-like windows, that massive church, whose rounded ceilings resemble a gigantic turtle, that crumpled dome, that rough quadrangular bell tower, that unfinished tower whose crumbling ruined walls are covered with vegetables and shelter owls, All that causes a deep sadness," nothing to do with the exterior grandeur of the other great Dominican convent in New Granada, the "convento de Santo Domingo, of Santa Fe de Bogotá.

However, the chronicler continues, "all that is changed in admiration when one crosses the threshold and contemplates the grand quadrilateral of the cloisters, ten meters high and proportionally wide, on two floors"; A spacious and airy building, simple, large, eloquent.

For that reason, the community soon acquired many movable and immovable property and became an important lender, thanks to the system of censuses, chaplains and pious works, favoring the call by the historians "economy of salvation".

It is known that in 1610 the Inquisition was inaugurated in Cartagena de Indias, and although the Dominicans were not in front of the court (except in one opportunity), yes they collaborated, like the other religious communities in the city, in the role of qualifiers, charged with theological study of propositions considered heretical, and to seek the repentance of the accused.