Calle de la Media Luna

Heredia Bridge begins where Calle de la Media Luna ends. This was once where the road from the mainland entered Cartagena, and the gates on it were the city’s only fortified entrance. In front of the gates were ditches and wooden bridges, while a concave artillery position formed a crescent, from which the street took its name. At night, the drawbridge closed off the passage; by day, traffic flowed along this road from the mainland, and merchants settled nearby. The fortification was later dismantled when carriages found the narrow passage too cramped.

On the night of June twenty-fourth to twenty-fifth, eighteen twenty-one, twenty-seven-year-old Swedish lieutenant colonel Federico Tomás Adlercreutz led soldiers toward Media Luna. He was a professional soldier: he left Swedish service and enlisted in the republican army besieging Cartagena. The Spanish garrison was commanded by Brigadier Gabriel de Torres. Torres sought to hold the last major Spanish stronghold in New Granada and refused to surrender the city.

Adlercreutz was assigned to distract the defenders. These gates were exactly right for such a maneuver.

Where Calle de la Media Luna leads toward today’s Heredia Bridge stood the only fortified entrance into Cartagena from the mainland. In sixteen thirty-one, the governor and military engineer Francisco de Murga ordered walls built around the expanded Getsemaní. In front of the gates, he laid out a curved artillery position with ditches and wooden bridges. Its concave outline was called Media Luna—a crescent. The street that led to it through the entire quarter took its name from the fortification.

People, carts, and supplies delivered from the mainland passed through these gates. At night, the drawbridge was raised, and in the morning it was lowered. Merchants settled along the road that made it impossible to bypass the city, and so Calle de la Media Luna became one of Getsemaní’s main commercial streets.

In the summer of eighteen twenty-one, its former purpose again proved decisive. Adlercreutz led the vanguard across the open expanse of Chambacú toward the bridge and the gates. The Spanish were meant to expect a land assault and keep men and guns on this side of the fortifications.

Meanwhile, the sailor José Prudencio Padilla, who commanded the republican flotilla, led ships into the inner bay. His men waited for the change of the Spanish guard detail and attacked. The battle lasted about an hour and a quarter. The republicans lost three men killed and eighteen wounded; the Spanish lost the entire flotilla in the bay. Adlercreutz did not take Media Luna—he achieved his aim of keeping it defended while Padilla cut Cartagena off from the sea.

Two weeks later, the forts at the entrance to the bay capitulated. On October first, Torres agreed to surrender the city, and on October tenth, a battalion under the command of José María Córdova was the first to enter fortified Cartagena through the gates of Media Luna. The surviving Spanish soldiers were sent to Cuba. Padilla received the rank of rear admiral, and Adlercreutz was appointed Cartagena’s chief military engineer.

In eighteen eighty-three, Congress authorized the dismantling of the outwork: the old gates had become a narrow passage for growing carriage traffic. Contractors were paid in the stone they took after dismantling it. Ten years later, the half-bastions on either side of the gates were also demolished.

Now Heredia Bridge begins at the outer end of the street, and traffic goes from the historic center toward the mainland. The stone crescent is no longer there. Its shape survives only in the name Calle de la Media Luna.