Cartagena crowned Elida Patricia Castro as the city’s new beauty queen and this year’s representative to the National Beauty Contest, to be held in November, newspaper El Universal reported Friday.
Castro was selected by a jury of five members, including Barranquilla Carnival Queen of 2012 Andrea Jaramillo, who spoke on behalf of the jury.
“She (Castro) generates a lot of impact when she enters a room and can further prepare herself in these next five months. She is a beautiful black woman, very complete and with the features of any international queen,” said Jaramillo.
The brown-eyed beauty is a 23-year-old graduate of the University Corporation of the Coast. She is an attorney and also owns a popular local salon bearing her name and says she hopes to move into business management.
“I want to show that the black race and middle-class women also can come to events as important as the National Pageant,” said the new queen.
This was the second time Castro competed for the title–she attributed her second-round win to God.
“When I competed the first time I was not prepared intellectually, I didn’t have the discipline and maturity that I have now for the title and most importantly, this was the will of God and that was not the right time. Now I am going to do the best representation,” said Castro in tears.
Castro also thanked her mother, Teresa Herrera, who she said continually encouraged her to not give up on her dream of being queen.
Herrera said her daughter had dreamed of being queen for more than 12 years. “I insisted she register again, she didn’t want to, but in the end she decided to for her dream, for our dream,” said Herrera.
