City (pop., 1999: 1,226,292), northern Colombia.
Founded in 1629 about 10 mi (16 km) from the mouth of the Magdalena River , it remained unimportant until the 1930s, when the clearing of sandbars made it an important port on the Caribbean Sea. It has since been rivaled by the Pacific Ocean port of Buenaventura, but it still handles goods from the interior and is the terminus of natural-gas pipelines from northern Colombia.