The nostalgic remains of the most prosperous port in the Caribbean, where only a few families of Hispanic origin remained over time, and slaves, who did not obtain their freedom until the second half of the nineteenth century. A multitude of victims of the great epidemic came to breathe their last breath of life in the wards of the hospital of San Juan de Dios, without that the doctors and religious could do much for their salvation, because against cholera there was no effective remedy. The Juaninos were busy caring for the sick, while new political developments challenged their humanitarian work. The anti-clerical movement that had led to the expulsion of the Jesuits from their college in Cartagena de Indias, increased throughout the nineteenth century.

In Spain, religious killings and the monasteries were burned down, while in America the governments of the emerging republics were not oblivious to the conflict. Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, as president of Colombia, confiscated in one thousand eight hundred and sixty-one the property of religious communities, and the Juaninos had to leave their derelict hospital, which was converted into an army barracks for the next twenty-one years.

The barracks functioned in the part of the building attached to the temple of Saint Ignatius, which was then converted into a stable, while the part occupied today by the Naval Museum was not used because it was in such a sorry state of ruin that it was practically no longer habitable. The former Jesuit apartments, which had been converted into hospital rooms, became barracks for soldiers, weapons depots and latrines in the midst of a disturbing political tension.

President Rafael Nunez gave the barracks to Archbishop Eugenio Biffi, in one thousand eight hundred and eighty-two, to be the seat of the local curia, in a moment of reconciliation between church and state. Archbishop Biffi, an Italian with iron will, patiently restored the building, with its temple, and finally returned it to the Jesuits eleven years later as a sanctuary dedicated to the life and work of Saint Peter Claver, apostle of slaves. The Museum, which was continuing to deteriorate, housed the first battalion of the Colombian Marine Corps in the early twentieth century. The appearance of the revamped Marine barracks was very different from that exhibited at its best by the austere Renaissance College.

The infantry barracks was moved in 1956 to a modern naval base on the Bocagrande peninsula, outside the colonial precincts, and the ruinous section of the building was offered to the Jesuits, but they did not accept it. No one wanted the remains of that old college, which had a shameful facet of Cartagena de Indias. The colonial building seemed destined to disintegrate, slowly, inhabited by rats, bats, and perhaps by the soul in sorrow of some bizarre character from its past, who continued wandering through its halls. Grau Araujo, the task of creating a space for the public to learn about Colombian naval history, since there was no institution specialized in this field in the country.

With the collaboration of Doctor Mauricio Obregón, historian and navigator, and the Minister of Public Works, Doctor Rodolfo Segovia Salas, Admiral Grau obtained the building’s lease from the Jesuits, in order to make it a Naval Museum, Not only of Cartagena, which was its initial name, but of the whole Caribbean Sea, idea of Doctor Obregón. In 1987, the first assembly of the Caribbean Naval Museum Foundation was held in one of the courtyards of this building, which is completely in ruins, and was chaired by Dr Mauricio Obregón and Vice-Admiral Carlos Ospina Cubillos, as a representative of the Navy Today the building of the Museum has two 2 museological rooms, the Republican room where you will find the exhibition called “Cartagena in the Caribbean Sea” and the Eduardo Wills room in which is the exhibition called “Naval Gallery”, offering an immersive tour through didactic modules that combine historical objects with models, sounds, videos and interactive simulators. National. To serve as the headquarters of the Caribbean Naval Museum, the old building returned to its times of greatest splendor, housing in its halls naval models, historical documents, archaeological pieces, models and many other educational objects, They are appreciated by thousands of young people every year. Behind the renovated lime on the walls of the building, under the rustic bricks of its floors, and buried deep in its shady courtyards, are the footprints of the students who passed through its corridors, of their masters, of the French pirates who plundered the city in the seventeenth century, of the sick who died in their halls, of the heroic defenders of Cartagena during independence, of the thousands of victims of cholera, of the military men who inhabited it in different times, and of the workers who rescued it from ruin.