Buying a SIM card at Rafael Núñez International Airport (CTG)

Eight minutes, and no paperwork

Rafael Núñez is a small airport and its SIM counter behaves like one. Claro and Movistar both appear in arrivals, the peak wait is about 8 minutes, and off-peak it is around 3. That is the quickest of the Colombian airports in our data.

No ID is required. Colombia does not ask for a document to sell a prepaid line, so there is no scan, no form and no clerk typing your passport number into a system — which is most of why the queue is as short as it is. A Colombian airport SIM costs about $10 in our records.

We hold the price and not the package. What allowance $10 buys at CTG is not something we can tell you, and Colombian prepaid bundles are revised often, so read it as the cost of getting a working local number. We hold no terminal-level detail either — no desk location, no opening hours, nothing about whether the counter covers early or late flights. This is a short page because there is genuinely little to say about this airport, and inventing airport advice to fill it would defeat the point.

The Old City is the actual reason to arrive connected

Cartagena's walled centre is a grid of narrow, repetitive streets, and the posadas and small hotels inside it are notoriously hard to find on a first visit. Street names change between blocks, buildings are not obviously numbered from a taxi window, and a driver who knows the district is not the same thing as a driver who knows your door.

That is a maps problem, and it is worth solving before you leave the terminal rather than after. It does not matter much whether you solve it with a counter SIM or an eSIM installed at home — either gets you into the old town with a working map. What does not work is planning to connect at the hotel, because finding the hotel is the part that needs the connection.

Beyond the city, our data holds nothing about Colombian coverage on the boat trips and beaches people take out of Cartagena, so we are not going to guess at it.

What each route costs

Small Colombian eSIM plans are not good value per gigabyte — $2.90 to $4.00 for one or two gigabytes is a meaningful share of what the whole airport SIM costs, which is why the counter is a defensible choice here rather than an obvious trap. The rate collapses at the top of the ladder: the verified 50 GB at $49 is $0.98 a gigabyte. For a long stay, look there before settling on a mid-size plan.

The counter also lets you pick a network by name. Buy online and you cannot: Airalo publishes no host network for Colombia, and its "Chimba" and "Chimba+" labels are product names at checkout rather than operators. Saily and Nomad publish no host network either. eSIMCard is the only one of the six sellers that publishes a host network at all — we read that on its Japan page — but the Claro and Movistar pair our own data carried for it here came from this site's generated text rather than from eSIMCard, so we no longer repeat it. Holafly names nothing, in Colombia or anywhere else. For a few days inside a walled city, this matters less than it would in the mountains — both networks at the counter cover Cartagena.

Full Colombian pricing is on the Colombia hub.