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Lounging by a pool of translucent ultramarine, I sipped at a well-mixed mojito and gazed at a shower of bougainvillea blooms that matched the peach-hued campanile of Cartagena's cathedral in the street opposite. Past the terrace, a skyline of towers and latticed balconies gave on to the azure Caribbean Sea beyond. The hotel, housed within a 17th-century mansion of jaw-dropping heft, boasted indulgently lavish rooms, scattered with mahogany furniture, Chinese porcelain and zebra-skin rugs. A brace of royal palms shaded a fern-carpeted courtyard.

The night before, I had strolled through the quiet streets of Cartagena, a once-illustrious port on Colombia's Caribbean coast, passing 300-year-old colonial Spanish palaces, churches and mansions, all washed in delicate shades of ochre, peach and sunflower. After dining al fresco in a leafy square, I had sat among a throng of students, buskers and tourists to enjoy the balmy night air.

I almost had to rub my eyes: Could so much beauty really exist in Colombia, once one of the world's most dangerous countries?

Yet tourist authorities in this city, located just 2 1/2 hours from Miami, have noticed a marked upturn in visitor numbers and are gearing up to welcome even more as the first major movie shot in the city in two decades is about to be released. The film version of Love in the Time of Cholera, the much-read tale of unrequited love by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, will be out in theatres next week. Just as vacationers flocked to Argentina and Chile after director Walter Salles's portrayal of Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, the cinematic version of Marquez's novel looks set to focus international interest on the city where Marquez himself worked as a cub reporter in the 1950s.

Once akin to Old Havana, decadent in crumbling splendour, the UNESCO World Heritage Site is already enjoying a much-needed makeover on the back of a tourism upswing.

Its walled Old City, once Spain's finest colonial outpost in the Americas, has been restored to its past grandeur. Boutique hotels have been carved from colonial-era townhouses, and long-neglected wooden-framed buildings are freshly painted, their massive balconies bedecked with bougainvillea and camelias.

The city has come a long way since Colombia's darkest days, when guerrilla warfare and narcotics trafficking plunged the country into a seemingly endless cycle of violence. For decades, the country was rightly considered too dangerous for all but the hardiest traveller.

Yet peace of a kind has broken out and adventurous visitors are returning — in record numbers, in fact. Exploiting a lull in the country's internecine strife, two million vacationers flew to Colombia last year, up more than 50 per cent over 2005. Surprisingly, high-spending European and American visitors are as visible as backpackers and South American travellers, particularly in Cartagena, where design-minded hotels and gourmet restaurants are attracting well-heeled travellers.

Much of this recovery can be attributed to Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, whose campaign against armed groups has posted dramatic results. Since winning office in 2002, Uribe has beaten the guerrillas back to their jungle hideouts, deployed the army to protect the highways and major cities and secured a dramatic fall in violence: In the first two years of his mandate, national murder rates dropped by 40 per cent, bombings by 66 per cent and kidnappings by 79 per cent. Violent crime in Cartagena, for instance, is now on par with large U.S. cities such as Philadelphia or Houston — still high, but not as high as before.

Even the cautious U.S. State Department noted in a June travel warning that "violence has continued to decrease markedly in most urban areas, including Cartagena." Canada's Consular Affairs Bureau, while urging visitors to exercise common-sense precautions, advises them that "in tourist resort areas, [including] Cartagena, criminal activity and violence directed at tourists is low, comparable to other destinations in the region." (As someone who lives in Buenos Aires and has travelled widely throughout Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, urban Colombia felt a lot safer to me than crime-racked cities in, say, Brazil or Venezuela.)

Cartagena itself displays the story of three centuries of imperial Spanish rule. Founded in 1533, it was used as a storehouse for treasure plundered by the Spanish from South America — gold, silver, and rare stones were collected within its massive forts until galleons could be mustered to ship them to Europe. Laden with riches, Cartagena thus presented a tempting target for the pirate crews that pillaged the coast.

Visitors find 11 kilometres of elaborate fortifications — built in belated response to a pirate attack in 1586, when Sir Francis Drake besieged the city for 100 days — encircling street after picturesque street, each lined with 300-year-old palaces, churches and townhouses, all bathed in blinding Caribbean sunlight.

So rich is the city's historical legacy, in fact, that it is treated almost casually. The peach-hued cathedral, for instance, still bears the scars of Drake's cannons, while the Palacio de la Inquisicion, once the seat of the Holy Office's Punishment Tribunal, now functions as a grisly museum of medieval religious torture.

At the bombastic Convento de San Pedro Claver, named after a 17th-century monk canonized for his ministry to Colombia's slave population, tourists can visit the cell where the Jesuit saint lived and died.

Exploring the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, Spain's largest American fort, I scurried through tunnels that lace beneath its impregnable bulk, which was never taken by force. The tunnels, which connect the fort's strategic points, were designed to accentuate sounds, allowing defending soldiers to hear an attacking enemy's faintest footstep.

Yet, on a visit in March, I found it easiest to discard a set itinerary in favour of an aimless ramble. The city's monumental ramparts, so extensive they were completed just 25 years before Colombia's independence, prevent the stroller from wandering into trouble on one of the meaner streets that lie beyond the Old City. (Old Cartagena — where all tourists stay and spend their days — is a bubble of prosperity, still protected from the "real" Colombia by the ramparts.) I strolled out each balmy morning — Cartagena's climate is almost constant year-round, averaging 32 C by day, cooling slightly by night — with little purpose, content simply to wander the maze of cobbled alleyways, leafy plazas and shadowed backstreets.

Along the way, I developed a taste for ajiaco, a staple Colombian stew of chicken, potato, corn and capers, elbowing plate space for myself at lunchtime cantinas crowded with locals. I struck up a rapport with an Afro-Colombian saleswoman who sold tiny corn pancakes called arepa from a tray she carried on her head. By night, I sampled oysters, snapper and grouper lifted fresh each morning from the nearby Caribbean waters and infused with tamarind, chili, coriander and coconut.

The city's finer offerings don't come cheap, at least compared with popular South American destinations, such as Argentina, Brazil or Chile.

A double room in a design-minded hotel starts at around $275 a night, a chic dinner for two $75, and a cocktail in a swinging bar $8.

Yet a quintessential Cartagena nocturnal experience needn't break the bank. It's difficult to beat sipping an ice-cold Club Colombia beer ($4) on Plaza San Diego, where restaurant tables spill into the street, artists peddle homemade jewellery and strolling guitarists strum Colombian ballads.

On sultry nights — and every night in Cartagena seems to be sultry — locals mingle at al fresco bars situated on the ramparts, where 17th-century stone turrets now house DJ booths. In the wee hours, I squeezed into Quiebra Canto, a salsa club in delightfully ramshackle surroundings in Getsemani, the outer zone of the walled city, and danced till dawn.

And then, of course, there's Marquez. Cartagena has long been associated with Colombia's most popular author, who studied at the local university and worked the city's then-seamy backstreets as a reporter in the 1950s. The writer's presence is strongly felt — locals frequently mention his name, affectionately calling him "Gabo."

Many of the city's notable buildings, too, became famous through Marquez's books: The 1617-built Convent of Santa Clara de Assisi, for instance, now one of the city's most elegant hotels, provided the setting for his 1994 novel Of Love and Other Demons.

Oddly, perhaps, Marquez rarely visits Cartagena: Disapproving of Colombia's strident politics, he has spent most of his adult life in Mexico. Yet he opted to celebrate his 80th birthday, last March, in March 2007, at the modernist red-stucco villa he still owns, overlooking Cartagena's ramparts and the turquoise Caribbean beyond.

Perhaps Gabo's ethereal presence is more appropriate than it seems. After all, Colombia itself has existed, yet not existed, for years; ever-present in headlines — especially with drug-and violence-related news from Medellin — it has been next to impossible to see it first-hand. Now, both onscreen and as a compelling destination, Cartagena, like Gabo, may finally be returning to the realm of the real.