Cartagena de Indias, Colombia tide times

Cartagena de Indias sits on Colombia's central Caribbean coast at about 10 degrees north, the colonial-era walled city and one of the great Spanish-American port towns of the Caribbean basin. The city wraps the long Bahía de Cartagena, an outer bay separated from the open Caribbean by the Tierrabomba and Barú island chain and reached through the Boca Chica entrance at the southern end and the Bocagrande channel at the northern. 6 metres and neaps dropping close to flat.

Two highs and two lows of unequal size each day, with the asymmetry between the higher high and the lower low varying through the lunar month and the equatorial position keeping the seasonal cycle weak. The astronomical signal is small because the Caribbean is an enclosed-but-deep basin and the propagating Atlantic tide enters mostly through the Yucatán Channel and the Greater Antilles passages, with significant phase damping by the time it reaches the South American coast. What matters more on a day-to-day basis is meteorological tide.

The trade winds blow steadily from the north-east across the open Caribbean and lift apparent water level on the windward (eastern) side of the Bahía de Cartagena by 20 to 40 centimetres during sustained events; the same wind builds the swell at La Boquilla east of the walled city. The bay is hot and shallow, with sea-surface temperatures staying between 27 and 30 degrees year-round, and the inner channels run through extensive mangrove systems. The defining hazard is hurricane-season storm surge, though Cartagena sits at the southern edge of the Caribbean hurricane belt and rarely takes a direct strike — most landfalling Caribbean hurricanes track north of about 15 degrees latitude into the Greater Antilles or the Yucatán.

Hurricane Joan in October 1988 was one of the few storms to track directly across the Colombian Caribbean coast at hurricane strength. The defining cultural feature is the colonial-era walled city. The 11-kilometre stone walls and the San Felipe de Barajas fortress above the city were built by the Spanish from the 1580s through the 1700s to defend the gold and silver shipments from Peru that staged through Cartagena to Spain via Havana — the Tierra Firme treasure fleet system that anchored the early-modern Atlantic trade.

The walls front directly onto the harbour at the Baluarte de Santa Catalina and the Baluarte de San Lucas. UNESCO inscribed the walled city and the fortress on the World Heritage list in 1984. The working port behind the walled city, the Bocagrande beach corridor, the ferry to the Rosario Islands offshore, and the snorkellers reading the inner-shelf coral at low water all read the table for different windows.

The Centro de Investigaciones Oceanográficas e Hidrográficas (CIOH) of the Colombian Navy publishes the authoritative tide tables; Open-Meteo Marine drives the gridded predictions on this page.