Plaza San Pedro Claver

This guide to Plaza San Pedro Claver in Cartagena follows Edgardo Carmona, a mechanical engineer turned welder who spent decades designing machinery before turning sheet iron and scrap metal into the life-size figures scattered across the square. You'll hear how a man who never called himself a sculptor learned to make stubborn, unyielding iron look loose and mid-gesture, and how he chose to render his own neighbors, the barber, the seamstress, the cart pusher, rather than kings or saints. At the plaza's center stands an older, gentler statue of the missionary Pedro Claver, whose seventeenth-century ministry to enslaved Africans arriving in this port still anchors the square Carmona's crowd now fills.