Staying connected in Cartagena

Two zones, and only one of them has signal

Inside the walls, Cartagena is well connected. The colonial Old City and the Bocagrande beach strip both have good coverage, with Claro and Movistar present. Add the government-sponsored free WiFi in the central plazas and it is genuinely difficult to be offline in the tourist core, even with no plan at all — which is convenient in a city where the main activity is photographing it.

Offshore is a different country. The boat crossing to the Rosario Islands has no signal, and the islands themselves have limited coverage. Ferry crossings to Barú and the open sea between islands are listed as dead zones too. Some interior streets in Getsemaní show slightly reduced signal, though nothing that stops a map loading.

The practical rule follows directly: download maps and load your tickets before you board any boat. Not on the dock, not while the engine is running — before.

48 Mbps, and why Claro is the local pick

The measured 4G average in Cartagena is 48 Mbps, against 55 Mbps nationally. Claro is named the best carrier here specifically, on better Cartagena-area coverage including Bocagrande and the surroundings. Nationally, Claro also has the widest coverage at 98% of the population, including the Caribbean coast; Movistar posts the fastest speeds in cities and was named the best-performing network in an Opensignal report published in April 2026.

For eSIM buyers that matters less than it sounds, because most of them will not tell you whose towers you end up on. 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 used to sit alongside it in that sentence: it publishes no host carrier for Colombia or anywhere else, and the names we carried against it were ours. Airalo, Saily and Nomad do not publish a host network in Colombia, or in any other country, so we cannot tell you which carrier those plans ride. We hold no eSIM Go rows for Colombia at all.

Inside the walled city that is a question you can afford to leave open: both major networks are present, the plazas have free WiFi on top, and nothing in our data separates them here. If your trip continues into rural Colombia and the wider Claro footprint is the point, the honest routes are to pick a seller whose own listing includes Claro — treating that as a claim rather than a tested fact — or to buy a Claro prepaid SIM in the city, which is the only way to know. Colombia asks for no ID, so that takes minutes.

Where to buy on the ground

Two options in the city that we hold. Claro stores in the Bocagrande mall area, and the arrivals area at Cartagena's airport — Rafael Núñez International (CTG), where Claro and Movistar are present and the peak queue runs about eight minutes.

Colombia requires no ID for a prepaid SIM, so an airport purchase is genuinely quick. A tourist SIM costs around $10.

Against that, the cheapest Colombian eSIM we can still price is Airalo's verified $4.00 for 1 GB over three days, or $4.50 for 1 GB over seven. A cheaper eSIMCard row used to head this list; it was withdrawn on 18 August 2026 after we read eSIMCard's site and found the figure wrong. Those two sit under different names on Airalo's site — it sells Colombia as Chimba and Chimba+, and the three-day gigabyte is Chimba while the seven-day one is Chimba+ — so look under both if you cannot find the plan you want.

The apps that need the data

Three come up repeatedly here: Google Maps with the Cartagena area saved offline, Klook or Viator for island and tour bookings, and InDriver for getting around. None of them are heavy, which is why 1 to 2 GB covers most short visits — the exception is anyone uploading video from the Old City, which will eat an entry plan in a day.

Timing matters more than usual

The Caribbean dry season runs December to April and is peak beach season. Heavy rains fall July to November. Christmas and New Year bring major crowds into the walled city, and a walled city is by definition a fixed volume — the same masts serving several times the normal density of people.

Nothing in our data says coverage degrades at those times, and we are not going to claim it does. But if you are visiting between Christmas and New Year, having your maps and bookings already downloaded is cheap insurance against a congested cell.

The full Colombian plan tables and coverage notes are on the Colombia hub.