Calle de La Sierpe

This guide to Calle de La Sierpe in Cartagena's Getsemani weighs two competing stories behind its name, a historian's plain theory about a homesick Sevillian settler and a stranger local legend from 1608 involving a hissing sound, a giant serpent, and a mayor's investigation. Beneath either version it traces who actually lived on this street, the masons, blacksmiths, shipwrights and dockworkers, many freed or enslaved Africans, who ran Cartagena's port while the walled city sheltered its elite. It follows how that history still shows up today, in murals painted along the same walls.