A Tale of Two Cities: Medellin, Colombia

‘The City of Eternal Spring’ unfolds itself messily, abundantly, across a deep and narrow valley. Vast Andean mountains surround a sea of brick red; peering out onto a never-ending cascade of high-rise blocks and makeshift housing. There’s heat, noise and a breakneck pace — but the streets of Medellin throb with an infectious energy.

Twenty-five years ago, Colombia’s second largest city of Medellin was dubbed the ‘most dangerous city on earth’. The tales of suffering and violence to come out of its history are obscene, and no one was immune: it wasn’t just within slums, and it wasn’t just amongst adults. Paramilitaries pillaged communities, people disappeared over night; gang lords exercised wanton reign and authorities were murdered daily. An infamous criminal made Medellin home to an empire, and in doing so tore it apart.

Certainly, given his cultural status in history, I was surprised to hear no mention of Pablo Escobar’s name on my recent walking tour of Medellin. So much has gone into sewing the metropolis back together, it’s as though a single utterance could be the pulling of a thread.

Pablo Escobar’s history with his hometown is a convoluted one. It’s sometimes understood in the West — given selective examples of his building projects and charity — that in his heyday, he retained the status of a latter-day Robin Hood (Netflix’s prolific production of ​Narcos​ has seen the kingpin become one of popular culture’s favourite antiheros). Tourists flock to paintball in his former mansion; guided cocaine tours end at his grave, where travellers have been seen consuming the Colombian ‘speciality’ as tribute.

It is true that Escobar sympathised with the poor. But his Medellin Cartel operation is also thought to have killed some 3500 people. Being there, in the present day, it was clear many ​paisa — a pronoun used by Medellin natives to distinguish themselves from the rest of Colombia — resented the Escobar legacy deeply. ‘Today’, my guide tells me, ‘we don’t say his name because we want to forget’.

It wasn’t Escobar’s hands alone that bore the city’s bloodshed. Medellin was also one of the front lines in the battle between the government and Farc, Colombia’s guerrilla movement; they too infiltrated slums, bombed the streets, terrorised the community. The sorts of repercussions to which people — including children — were subjected for crossing invisible territorial boundaries are nothing short of horrifying.

But fast forward to today, and Medellin is a thriving artistic and cultural hub. Tourism in Colombia has grown more than 300% in the last decade, and I was taken aback at how genuinely thrilled they are to have us. Locals stop to welcome you in the street; they ask where you’re from, wish you the best. Their passion for their country is soul-stirring, the native pride in their renaissance palpable. It was ordinary people that reclaimed their city — and country — from guerrillas and gang lords. Enough was enough. After decades of civil war, Colombia called for the carving of a new identity.

Whilst Medellin’s transformation is a facet of a much broader national revival, it’s more pronounced here than anywhere. Ask the ​paisa about the city’s turning points, and the metro, of all things, is top of the list. Constructed in 1994, the cultural weight attached to their primary transport system is surprisingly inspired. ‘The metro showed us that things could be different’, my guide told me. ‘Suddenly, people could move around the city, venture beyond their barrios. They worked in different neighbourhoods, mixed with new people. The metro bridged the gaps between isolated parts of the city. It united us’.

Communa 13 was once the city’s most notorious neighbourhood. Crawling up the western hills of Medellin, it was a pivotal centre for gang and guerilla activity, and as such was largely neglected. Now? An infinitely spirited community championing artistic, political and social expression above all else. Every wall in sight is adorned with elaborate skulls, soaring eagles; laughing children and blooming flowers. The street art acknowledges darker days, whilst projecting a brighter future. In 2011, bright orange escalators were installed; the only barrio in the city to have them, they’re the pride and joy of locals.

Plazoleta de las Esculturas is equally as enchanting. Twenty-three brilliantly disproportionate sculptures line the grand central square, each one a national treasure by the hands of Latin America’s most famous artist, Fernando Botero. As my guide playfully pointed out, the brass has discoloured where people touch the figures — naturally the breasts and the testicles, then. Old men play checkers and strum guitars; children play whilst couples promenade.

And that’s not even the beginning. Everywhere you turn, new things are happening. In Barefoot Park, passers-by are encouraged to discard their shoes to wriggle their toes in pebbles, mud, and soft grass before finally soaking their feet in pools of water. Cable cars carry passengers aloft above the rooftops and congested lanes in glass pods. The economy is among the fastest growing on the continent, and just a few years ago Medellin was hailed as ‘the most innovative city in the world’ by the Urban Land Institute.

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