Medellín: The City That Decided to Be Something Else

Medellín was the most dangerous city on earth. Then it decided to become something else entirely. Here is why Colombia's most transformed city belongs on every serious traveler's list.

TRAVEL

Will

6/17/20265 min read

Medellin Night time
Medellin Night time

Travel | FlyAssLife

Let's get the obvious out of the way immediately.

Yes, Pablo Escobar was from here. Yes, the 1990s happened. Yes, Medellín held the distinction of most dangerous city on earth for years running, with a homicide rate that made every other city's violence statistics look like a rounding error. The Netflix series exists. The narco tourism industry exists — jeep tours to the old Escobar properties, selfies at sites that the people who actually lived through those years find somewhere between offensive and incomprehensible.

A significant portion of Medellín's population would prefer that the first paragraph of every piece written about their city not begin where this one just did. They have a point. But the transformation is inseparable from what it transformed from, and the transformation is the story.

What this city did after the bottom is one of the more remarkable things any city has done anywhere in the last thirty years. Not remarkable in the way that's used to describe something mildly surprising. Remarkable in the way that makes urban planners fly in from Europe and Asia specifically to study it, that won Medellín the Urban Land Institute's award for Most Innovative City in 2013 over New York and Tel Aviv, that produced a civic philosophy so distinct and deliberate that it has a name — urbanismo social — and a body of work that continues to shape how architects and city planners think about what public space is for.

What They Built and Why It Matters

The comunas — the hillside neighborhoods that ring the valley floor where the wealthier city sits — were effectively disconnected from Medellín's economic life for decades. The geography that made them affordable made them inaccessible. The violence that concentrated there made them invisible. The municipal government's response, beginning in the early 2000s under mayor Sergio Fajardo, was not to gentrify them or ignore them but to connect them and invest in them with the specific intention of treating their residents as citizens deserving of what the city center already had.

They built cable cars — gondolas — running from the valley floor up into the hillside communities, integrating them into the metro system so that a resident of Comuna 13 could reach the commercial center in twenty minutes rather than two hours. Then they built escalators — the longest outdoor escalator system in the world — serving neighborhoods where the topography made walking to the bottom an exercise that consumed an hour each way.

Then they hired Giancarlo Mazzanti, one of the most thoughtful architects working in Latin America, to design the España Library — a structure that looked like three black rocks balanced on the hillside of one of the poorest neighborhoods in the city, filled with computers and books and community space that the neighborhood had never had access to. It was demolished in 2016 due to structural issues but not before it had done what it was designed to do: demonstrate that public institutions in poor neighborhoods could be architecturally significant rather than functional afterthoughts.

The philosophy underneath all of it — the cable cars, the escalators, the libraries, the parks — was not charity. It was the recognition that a city's standard applies to all of it or applies to none of it. You cannot have a beautiful center and an invisible periphery and call yourself a serious city. Medellín decided to be serious.

The City That Exists Now

El Poblado is where most visitors stay and it earns the attention. The neighborhood sits above the city on the eastern hillside, dense with restaurants and bars and boutique hotels and the specific energy of a place that has figured out how to be cosmopolitan without losing its Colombian character. The streets are narrow and tree-lined and the coffee is extraordinary — Colombia produces some of the finest single-origin coffee on earth and in Medellín you drink it the way it was intended, prepared by people who understand what they're working with.

Carmen is the restaurant that most serious food travelers are going to encounter first, and it deserves the reputation — modern Colombian cuisine that takes the country's biodiversity seriously and translates it into something that belongs on any list of the best restaurant experiences in South America. Celele in Cartagena has the same seriousness, and if the itinerary extends to the coast — as it should — that's the meal to plan the day around.

The Charlee Hotel in El Poblado is the luxury anchor — rooftop pool, views across the valley, the kind of design intelligence that doesn't happen accidentally. The outdoor spaces are calibrated to the Medellín climate, which sits at 1,500 meters elevation and maintains an almost constant spring temperature that the city's residents call la ciudad de la eterna primavera — the city of eternal spring. You will not need a coat. You will not be oppressively hot. The weather is, without qualification, among the finest of any major city on earth.

On Safety and Moving With Sense

The question gets asked because the history demands it and deserves a direct answer: Medellín is safe for the traveler who moves with the same awareness they'd bring to any major city anywhere. El Poblado and Laureles are the neighborhoods where visitors spend most of their time and both are as navigable as Barcelona or Buenos Aires or any city that gets recommended without the caveat.

The narco tourism circuit — the Escobar tours, the sites associated with the cartel years — is worth avoiding not primarily for safety reasons but for the more straightforward reason that spending your time in Medellín looking backward at its worst chapter while the city is actively building something extraordinary in the present is a poor use of the experience. The city has moved. You, as the visitor, should too.

Why This Is a FlyAssLife City

Monaco is obvious. Paris has been written. The Amalfi Coast exists in ten thousand identical photographs. These places are beautiful and the beauty is real and none of that is the point.

The point is the standard. What Medellín represents — the decision made by a city at its absolute lowest point to become something categorically different through deliberate investment in quality, design, and the dignity of its people — is the FlyAssLife argument applied to urban scale. You don't accept the default. You decide what the standard is. You build toward it with conviction and without apology even when the building is hard and the skepticism is loud.

The traveler who arrives in Medellín with that frame sees a different city than the one the Escobar narrative describes. They see a valley full of cable cars and libraries and serious restaurants and perpetual spring and people who decided, collectively, that their city was going to be worth something.

It is. Go see it.

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Best time to visit: December–March or July–August (dry seasons)

Getting there: José María Córdova Airport (MDE), connections through Bogotá, Miami, or New York

Where to stay: The Charlee Hotel (El Poblado), Casa Dann Carlton, or Oakwood Medellín

Must eat: Carmen (modern Colombian), Herbario, El Social for casual local food

Must see: Cable car to Santo Domingo, Plaza Botero, Jardín Botánico, Laureles on a weekend

Drink: Single-origin Colombian coffee everywhere, aguardiente if the evening calls for it

Climate: Eternal spring — 70s°F year round, no coat needed, no brutal heat

Verdict: The city that decided to be something else. It worked. Go see what conviction looks like at scale.

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