– FELIPE G. PAGÁN – AYTO CARTAGENA – Archive
Cartagena has surpassed the record number of visitors for the best year in the history of Puerto de Culturas, as announced by the mayor, Noelia Arroyo, who said that «this Thursday has been a very important day for tourism in Cartagena», according to municipal sources in a statement.
The highest number of visitors in a year was recorded in December 2019, following a growth trend that was interrupted by the pandemic.
In 2022, the City Council’s network of museums approached half a million visits, although it lagged behind the number of visits in 2019. This year, the record has been broken before the end of the December long weekend.
Arroyo acknowledged that «we knew we had it within reach, because the long weekend had started very well, and we broke the record at mid-morning on Thursday. We surpassed the 517,000 visitors of 2019; in fact at two o’clock in the afternoon we already had a thousand more visitors than in the whole of that year».
He went on to say that «this increase is very important for the entire tourism sector in Cartagena, which has worked hard to overcome the problems of the pandemic». In fact, he considered that the slump caused by the health crisis «has definitely been left behind thanks to all the effort made by the tourism companies and also by the administration».
«Visitors are responding because we have managed to create a very attractive heritage destination. And it will continue to grow because we continue to recover monuments to incorporate them into the network of Puerto de Culturas and attract more tourists to Cartagena,» he concluded.