Based on recent studies about the functions of and memory, this article approaches the literal reconstruction of Colombian cities, particularly Cartagena de Indias. This city is emblematic of our problematized modernity, fabulated by two contemporary narrators: German Espinosa and Roberto Burgos Cantor. The former, while reconstructing Cartagena in his La tejedora de coronas (1982), inspires a historical and encyclopedial memory of mannerist ancestry, to evidence unresolved crises of a past thought to be concluded. The latter, in El vuele de la paloma (1995), invokes a collective and regenerative memory of baroque ancestry, to evidence the assymetries and irregularities of modernization and urbanization processes that took place since the second half of the 20th century.