Our Family LUCES
about us
Welcome to Luces del Mundo.
We are a small, family-run restaurant in the heart of Cartagena. Yes, you come here to eat… but you also come to step into a place with history. A place where the cuisine travels and the walls speak.
Our kitchen is fusion with a Mediterranean soul: flavors from different cultures around the world, adapted to our ingredients, our way of understanding the table, and the care of home-cooked food.
And if you look around, you’ll understand why we call ourselves Lights of the World.
On one of our walls, there is no wallpaper or bought decoration. There is something far more special: authentic pages from books. To open this restaurant, María —the founder— gathered her family and friends, and page by page, they glued real pages from various books until the entire wall was covered. It was a labor of love, a ritual of beginning, as if the place itself were literally born from stories.
This gesture connects with everything else in the restaurant.
You will also find the actual typewriters, along with paintings of old typewriters on pages, displayed throughout the restaurant.
They’re not there out of nostalgia: they’re there because María is a writer. She traveled across Europe by motorcycle with her partner, and along the roads, they wrote stories. In those stories, street lamps and lights appeared again and again: small beacons that guide you while you travel… and when you return.
That’s why another wall is covered with real photographs of street lamps:
"Light to guide you, light to keep you going, light to remind us that there is always something shining.”
You’ll see paintings created on book pages: pages joined together like chapters, with black illustrations and small touches of color —red, yellow, and blue— inspired by a French painter who worked in exactly this way, using text as his base. That’s why there are series of paintings that respond to each other from one wall to another, like a story that continues.
And there is one final chapter that was born from day-to-day life: for years, Luces was a refuge for readers and wine lovers. We came to have many wines from small, lesser-known wineries across Spain —beyond the usual names. With so many toasts, corks began to pile up… and those corks became memory: three handmade artworks created from corks used right here in the restaurant.
This is Luces del Mundo: a restaurant where the world comes together on the plate, where literature holds up the walls, and where each table lights up its own story.
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