Cartagena is one of the few cities where the airport is a neighbourhood rather than a journey. Rafael Núñez sits in Crespo, inside the built-up city, and the taxi fare from its door is fixed by municipal decree, barrio by barrio.
The airport is inside the city
OINAC, the concession that operates Rafael Núñez, describes the airport as sitting within the urban area in the Crespo neighbourhood, 10 minutes from the historic centre and the convention centre, and 15 minutes from the hotel zone. That single sentence is the only distance or duration any official issuer publishes about this trip.
No issuer publishes a figure in kilometres. None publishes a walking route, a walking time, or how far the nearest bus stop is from the terminal door. What Cartagena does publish, and almost no Colombian city does, is the price.
For scale: Aerocivil recorded 4,506,104 passengers through Rafael Núñez between January and July 2026, which makes it the third busiest airport in Colombia with 7.61 per cent of national traffic, behind Bogotá and Rionegro. Its operator, OINAC, closed 2025 at 7,756,298 passengers.
The fare is set by decree, zone by zone
Decree 0051, issued on 20 February 2026 and signed by mayor Dumek Turbay, fixes taxi fares across Cartagena for the year. Its section II is headed “from the airport (and vice versa) to”, so the same figure applies in both directions. These are the zones a visitor actually uses, verified September 2026:
| Where you are going | Official fare |
|---|---|
| Centro, San Diego, La Matuna, Getsemaní, Crespo, Marbella, Cabrero, Torices | 20,200 COP |
| Centro hotel zone of the historic centre, Muelle de la Bodeguita, La Boquilla and Morros | 24,300 COP |
| Manga, Pie de la Popa, Pie del Cerro | 28,500 COP |
| Bocagrande, Castillogrande, El Laguito | 34,400 COP |
| Zona Franca, Mamonal and the industrial belt | 41,700 to 74,300 COP |
A night surcharge of 1,100 COP applies between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m. For comparison, the minimum urban taxi fare in the city for 2026 is 12,250 COP, so the airport run to Getsemaní costs less than twice a short city hop.
Two other airport fares in the same decree are worth knowing. The bus terminal to the airport is 45,500 COP, which tells you how far out the bus terminal really is. The tourist dock at the Sociedad Portuaria to the airport is 37,000 COP.
Two prices for the same walled city
Here is the ambiguity the decree leaves open, and it is the one most likely to cost you money.
Zone 1 covers “Centro, San Diego, La Matuna, Getsemaní” at 20,200 COP. Zone 2 covers “Centro, hotel zone of the historic centre” at 24,300 COP. The decree does not define where one ends and the other begins, and a hotel inside the walls can plausibly be described either way. A driver quoting 24,300 COP for an address in the old town is not necessarily overcharging.
The practical move is to name your street, not your district, and to ask which zone the driver is applying before the boot closes. If the answer is Getsemaní or San Diego, the number should be 20,200 COP.
What the driver is required to show you
Article 3 of the decree obliges taxi companies to issue every vehicle a control card carrying the official fares, within 10 calendar days of the decree taking effect. Article 4 sets the penalty: a driver whose fare notice is missing, deteriorated, altered, or not legible to the passenger is fined the equivalent of 8 daily minimum wages, under article 21 of Law 1383 of 2010.
So the fare table is not a courtesy. It is a document the driver must be able to show you, and its absence is itself an offence.
OINAC publishes a matching arrangement at the terminal: two authorised taxi stations, at the national and international exits, operating 24 hours in line with airport operations, with the authorised fares reachable through QR codes posted at the ranks. There is no prepaid window, no voucher and no named cooperative. The airport recommends using those two ranks and nothing else.
If a driver refuses the published fare, the DATT, the city transit authority that produced the cost study behind the decree, takes reports on WhatsApp at 323 319 0810.
Ride-hailing sits outside all of this. The Ministerio de Transporte states that it does not authorise technology platforms, only transport companies, and the Superintendencia de Transporte fined the operators of DiDi, Beat and Cabify a combined 1,722,249,486 COP in 2022 for facilitating unlicensed service. Uber, DiDi and InDrive go unmentioned by OINAC anywhere on its site, in either direction.
No bus reaches the terminal
Transcaribe, the city’s mass transit system, charges 3,900 COP per trip in 2026, set by Decree 017 of 15 January and in force since 23 January. None of its routes serves the airport.
The closest is the T102 trunk route, Portal to Crespo, which runs past the airport without stopping at it. Its published stops at the Crespo end are on carreras 2, 4 and 6, plus Corales de Indias. Transcaribe publishes the T102 timetable as Monday to Friday from 5:00 to 21:00, Saturdays 5:30 to 20:30, and Sundays and holidays 6:00 to 20:00. Those hours are confirmed by OINAC, which describes the system as running “near the airport”, an accurate way to put it.
Neither issuer publishes how far the walk from those stops to the terminal door actually is. That gap matters more than it sounds, because it is the difference between a 3,900 COP trip and a 20,200 COP one.
Conventional city buses do serve the terminal, and here OINAC contradicts itself on the same page. One answer in its frequently asked questions gives urban bus hours as 6:50 to 23:45. Another, a few lines away, says public collective transport runs from 5:00 to around 23:30. No operator, route number or stop is named by OINAC, so neither claim can be checked. City-wide, the Alcaldía set 2026 collective fares at 4,000 COP for buses and busetas and 3,900 COP for microbuses.
The honest summary: unless you are travelling light and patient, the decreed taxi fare is the option that exists in writing.
The access road is being rebuilt
Rebuilding work by OINAC covers 1,880 m2 of facade and main hall, and it reaches the road. The published plan closes the two right-hand lanes of Calle 70A, the access road, in three phases. Public transport is routed onto the two left-hand lanes, and private vehicles are sent through two lanes opened inside the terminal car park. The stated duration is seven months.
The wider modernisation, under a concession contract between the ANI and OINAC worth more than 920,000 million COP over 8.5 years, is reported at 5 per cent progress. No completion date is published for either the works or the lane closures, so treat kerbside drop-off as unpredictable and allow extra time on departure.
Two more things OINAC states plainly. There is no luggage storage at the airport, so a late flight and an early checkout do not combine well here. And the 2026 airport tax is USD 54 international and 24,700 COP domestic.
Getting back to the airport
The decree covers the return at the same price, which removes the usual airport-run haggling. From Getsemaní or the Centro the fare is 20,200 COP, from Bocagrande 34,400 COP, plus 1,100 COP if you leave between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m.
Allow more than the 10 minutes OINAC quotes. Its own guidance disagrees with itself on how early to arrive: the frequently asked questions say two hours for domestic flights and three for international, while its practical travel guide says three and four. Take the longer figure while the access road is down to two lanes.
If Cartagena is the start of a wider trip, the same airport feeds the islands and the coast. Boats to the Rosario Islands leave from the city, not the airport, Barú is reached by road or water, and how the terminal, the port and the buses fit together is covered in the guide to transportation from Cartagena.
Decree 0051 of 2026 sets 20,200 COP to Centro, San Diego, La Matuna and Getsemaní, and 24,300 COP to what it calls the hotel zone of the historic centre. A surcharge of 1,100 COP applies between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m.
The same decree sets 34,400 COP to Bocagrande, Castillogrande and El Laguito, in both directions.
OINAC, the airport operator, publishes 10 minutes to the historic centre and 15 minutes to the hotel zone. No issuer publishes the distance in kilometres.
No Transcaribe route serves the terminal. The nearest is the T102 to Crespo, at 3,900 COP, stopping on carreras 2, 4 and 6. OINAC says conventional urban buses serve the airport but names no route or operator.
The Ministerio de Transporte states it does not authorise technology platforms, and the Superintendencia de Transporte has fined several of them. The airport publishes only two authorised taxi ranks, at the national and international exits.
No. OINAC states that it does not offer a luggage storage service at its facilities.
The rest of the coast, from Barranquilla to La Guajira, is collected in the the Caribbean coast guides.
About Voytara
Voytara publishes informational guides on how transportation works across Colombia, using figures taken from the operators and authorities that publish them. Every figure on this page was read from its issuer in September 2026 and is named with the body that published it. Where an issuer publishes nothing, this guide says so instead of estimating. Voytara does not sell transport services or operate tours.
