SKCG CARTAGENA RAFAEL NÚÑEZ XP11/XP12

WELCOME TO COLOMBIA

It was in Cartagena where Colombian aviation took its first steps.
At the end of 1919, the Cartagena businessmen Nemesio De la Espriella and Guillermo Echavarría from Antioquia began negotiations to import French aircraft from the Farman de Aviación company, the only inconvenience was the arrival of the aircraft in Cartagena, unarmed, in a box. In September 1919, Echavarría and other Medellín industrialists founded the Compañía Colombiana de Navegación Aérea, or CCNA, with Cartagena as its center of operations, but CCNA's headquarters remained in Medellín.
Immediately a hangar of palm trees was erected on the Boca Grande land, which at that time was a simple peninsula covered with mangroves, icons and the occasional farmhouse. The hangar has the following specifications: 30 m (meters) from Boca, especially to be able to leave the bay with seaplanes and land vehicles, from where the Columbia Air Navigation Company departed in 1920.
On February 22, 1920, the mail flight to Barranquilla caused so many surprises that a week later the first stone with which Colombia's national airport was built was buried in the sand and they thought of importing a new plane, El Goliat, baptized as Barranquilla. In 1920, the first Cartagena airport, owned by the Colombian Air Navigation Company, was established on land in Boca Grande. On January 26, 1928, Cartagena received at this airport the greatest pioneer of transatlantic aviation: Charles Lindbergh, who landed at the helm of his ship "Spirit of St. Louis". After several accidents, French technical problems and competition with SCADTA in Barranquilla, the CCNA was dissolved in 1922

In 1930, a new airport owned by the Colombian-German Air Transport Society (SCADTA) was inaugurated on the island of Manzanillo. Later, in 1939, during the German seizure of assets, SCADTA was forcibly merged with the state-owned company SACO (Colombian Air Service), renaming itself and renaming itself Avianca, short for Aerovías Nacionales de Colombia.3.

In 1947 LANSA appeared, located in Crespo and built two runways; one main runway was 1,600 m long and the other 930 m long for the crosswind. At the time, Cartagena had two airports, but in the 1950s LANSA sold these facilities to Avianca, which closed its operations in Manzanillo and moved to Crespo.

The Rafael Núñez International Airport of Cartagena is located within the urban area of ​​the city in the Crespo neighborhood, just 10 minutes from the historic center and the Cartagena de Indias Convention Center and 15 minutes from the hotel zone of the city. .

Currently the Rafael Nuñez Airport connects Cartagena de Indias with 8 national destinations: Bogotá, Cali, Medellín, Bucaramanga, Pereira, Montería and San Andrés, Cucuta; and 11 international: Lima, Panama City, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, Atlanta, New York, Toronto, Montreal and Amsterdam, Orlando and Mexico.