Leaving the beach and especially Taganga behind was a hard decision. It took us 10 days to escape this awesome lifestyle, with great people and the best hostel so far. But it was time for something new and we were curious for some big city adventure! This lead us into the once most dangerous city of the world… Medellin!
Most of you heard about Medellin from either the news or from the famous Netflix show Narcos. Yes, the city has a lot of terrible history and we were ready to face and explore it on our own! But definitely not by becoming one of the Pablo Escobar tourists!
We started our journey with our first plane ride within Colombia. With only around 50€ going by plane is quite cheap here. Our destination inside the city was in the famous district of El Poblado, the most touristic district. After a good night of sleep and some first impressions of our neighbourhood it was time to visit the most awesome tourist attraction of the city: The Metro!
Comuna 13
The people are very proud of their Metro system and we could understand why. It’s cheap, fast and you can reach every destination in the second largest city of Colombia! And it’s the only city in Colombia which has something like that. So it was really easy for us to get to our free walking tour in the famous Comuna 13 district.
To understand the history behind the Comuna we had a local guide who was 28 years old and lived there his whole life. First of all we had to realize that Medellin consists of 16 different areas, called Comunas.
The big problem that Comuna 13 faced from early on was that it was basically an area not really managed by the local government. In the 70s and 80s a big immigration wave came to Medellin. These people just settled down in this free area and built there own houses. Of course it came to problems between immigrants and people that lived or owned land there before. Furthermore gangs saw their opportunity because there was not much police protection. With the location in the hills they also had a great spot to do drug trafficking. Not many jobs and no basic living conditions like running water lead to a lot of violence. Everybody was fighting for themselves! And when the government tried to interfere it got even worse…
You can imagine that we were really impressed and also shocked by all the stories we heard from our guide. He even told us that he saw his first dead body when he was only 6 years old! The sound of gunshots and explosions got pretty normal for him growing up in the Comuna 13…
As somebody coming from Europe it was hard to realize what the people went through. But we felt it on every corner of the Comuna. The People were just so friendly and happy about us getting to know their history. Greeting us all personally was the best feeling and we were happy to experience the change the city and especially Comuna 13 went through in the last 10 years!
The city changes
After that we wanted to know even more and so we did another free walking tour around the city center.
This time it felt more touristic as we did the tour with a well known organization. Nonetheless we got more history and the guide even told us a little bit about the era of the famous drug lord. It was very good that he didn’t mention his name during the tour as of course everybody knows his name but not English very well. So other people might get the wrong impression what the guide is talking about. He definitely didn’t glorify him and told us the harsh truth what happened during those years.
In the years of his terror regime the city got into a war zone. Bombs going off were part of daily life. He tried to compensate that by giving houses and money to poor people. So we got to understand why the poor people and also the young people sometimes still like him. But one thing they forget is that you can’t compensate a human life just by money!
We experienced a whole other part of town that is really busy with a lot of shops during daytime. At night you should definitely not stay in the center. Only if you are up for the challenge of not getting robbed. Besides that the center also offers great places and sightseeing spots! We really enjoyed seeing this part as well.
More history?
No, definitely not…After these tours we really got a good understanding and were enjoying the rest of our time by getting a little bit out of the city and also into the modern life of Medellin!
Besides the great metro system there is also the cable car system. We had to experience that as well, as it gave us a great overlook over the city and lead us outside into the big Park Arvi.
The amazing changes of this city lead to quite an European Lifestyle. Very big shopping malls kept us for a whole day in their grip. At night we went to a famous rock pub and got to watch one of the best cover bands we saw so far! Even with some Rammstein performance!
The city really got to us and we had 5 amazing days with a lot of new impressions! Medellin is definitely not a dangerous city anymore! We now understand what “change” meant for the people in Colombia and why everybody loves Medellin so much…
