Carlos Monsiváis.

Fernando Vallejo.

Mapfre workshop.

Junot Díaz keeps quiet.

Fabrizio Mejía Madrid and Carmen Boullosa on the lookout.

Luis Sepúlveda on guard.

Saša Stanišić makes his escape.

Carmen Yañez, Mayra Santos-Febres and Adriana Lisboa.

by Mauricio Builes

We were warned. The opening event of Hay Festival Cartagena would be packed. Tickets sold out days in advance. Miguel Bosé and Juanes couldn’t stroll through the walled city without being besieged by their fans. Journalists came to blows over the press ticket quota. Everyone wanted to hear speak – not sing – the two stars of the moment. The tickets that cost 10,000 pesos at the box office were being sold on the black market for 100,000. It was the frenzy of pop fandom at its height.

The events that followed in the afternoon and evening were also hugely popular, but this time there were no returns for sale nor frantic jostling between journalists. There was a repeat of the aggression however, in the talk given by a man who makes many angry with his diatribes against the church and politicians… Tickets for Fernando Vallejo had been sold out for a week.

Less inflammatory, something amusing occurred during Carlos Monsiváis’ event. In one of the gems thrown out to the audience, he said: ‘I stopped believing in Jose Alfredo Jiménez from the day that King Juan Carlos sang in public. But I follow him because he’s the king’. What the Mexican writer didn’t know was that the Infanta Elena de Borbón was in the audience. ‘I had no idea she was there. I feel bad, but I don’t have a platform for a public response,’ he said to me hours later, with irony.

Mauricio Builes is a Colombian journalist and graduate of the University of Antioquia. He is currently a correspondent for the review Semana in Medellín.

Roberto Pombo, the new director of El Tiempo, following in the footsteps of singers Juanes and Miguel Bosé. His strengths lie in journalism.

Opening the festival, Juanes and Bosé try out a couple of songs in the Teatro Heredia.

The five members of Asian Dub Foundation are new to many of the festival audience, but their energy and sound made everyone jump and shout.

Everyone enjoyed Asian Dub Foundation’s two-hour set – what better way to end the first day of the festival?

Cartagena nights… no one was heard complaining.

by Mauricio Builes

The last days of January are usually sad and boring in Cartagena. The tourists return to their daily lives and the streets of the ‘heroic city’ revert to quiet. But the fourth edition of Hay Festival Cartagena has already begun to change that landscape.

Today – Wednesday – for example, there was a preview event in Riohacha, capital of Guajira; a taster of what is to come this weekend. Martin Caparrós, Weildler Guerra, Luis Sepúlveda were among a handful of writers attracting hundreds of people to hear their talk on the fascinating pull of the Amazon in literature. ‘It was amazing,’ said Sepúlveda, ‘We have to do this again next year’. Within Cartagena’s walled city, the stages and marquees for the Festival events are already up. The feted photographer Daniel Mordzinski is already capturing the writers at their most revealing and interesting moments: their arrivals, their encounters with old friends, their reactions to a city that, in many cases, is no stranger to them.

Today, Spanish writer Cristina Fernández Cubas, Colombian author Luis Fayad and Antonio Sarabia, from Mexico, walked together through one of the most popular districts of Cartagena, La Boquilla. To get there they had to push the car that was supposed to be transporting them, which had got clogged with the sand on the beach. This accident was only the beginning of a day not often imagined for a writer by their readers: rocking themselves in hammocks, making silly jokes next to the beach and fits of laughter throughout. And there was still time for Sarabia to interpret some of the main characters in his book Los Convidados del Volcán for his readers.

It has barely started but already we don’t want it to end. This great celebration of literature – the best pretext to talk about books – is here again in Cartagena.

Mauricio Builes is a Colombian journalist and graduate of the University of Antioquia. He is currently a correspondent for the review Semana in Medellín.

Author badges… before the arrivals

Óscar Collazos enjoys a beer

Luis Fayad contemplates the sea

Cristina Fernández Cubas, Antonio Sarabia and Luis Fayad on the beach

Cristina Fernández Cubas jokes with kids in Cartagena

Antonio Sarabia writes his love letters