Medellin: what to see, where to stay and how to get around

Now in Medellin--:--:--

--°

Medellin sits in a narrow valley at fourteen hundred and ninety-five metres, which gives it twenty-two degrees every single day of the year and the nickname city of eternal spring. There are no seasons here at all. The old centre is flat, loud, entirely local and the one part of town with no foreigners in it, and Botero gave it twenty-three bronzes to stand outdoors in the middle of all that. Two hours. Go in the morning, carry nothing visible, and do not wander north of the market after dark.

A short history of Medellin

Spaniards settled in the Aburrá Valley in the 17th century, and Medellín was granted the status of an official town in 1675. In the 19th century it grew rich on gold and coffee, and textile mills were built here in the early 20th century. In the 1980s it was the centre of Pablo Escobar's drug cartel and was considered the most dangerous city in the world. Escobar was killed in the city in December 1993. In 1995 Colombia's first metro opened here, and in 2004 a cable car line began linking the poor hillside neighbourhoods with the centre.

The ten best sights in Medellin

1
Plaza Botero
Twenty-three Botero bronzes standing outdoors in the open square, given by him to his home city. Free, always open, and people touch them.
2
Museo de Antioquia
Holds the Botero donation indoors and the regional collection. The second oldest museum in Colombia and the one that anchors this square.
3
Palacio de la Cultura
The black and white striped Gothic pile facing the square, designed by a Belgian and never finished to the plan. Walk into the spiral stair.
4
Museo Casa de la Memoria
The museum of the conflict, built by the city for the victims of it. Free, hard, and the most important building in Medellin.
5
Parque Inflexion
The block where Escobar apartment tower stood until the city demolished it in February 2019 and put a victims memorial in its place. The point is the absence.
6
Basilica de la Candelaria
The oldest church in the city, from the seventeen hundreds, and it was the cathedral until 1931. On Parque Berrio, in the middle of the noise.
7
Catedral Metropolitana
One of the largest buildings in the world made entirely of fired brick: about one million one hundred and twenty thousand of them.
8
Iglesia de San Ignacio
A Jesuit church and cloister from the seventeen hundreds with a baroque interior, and the university that became the University of Antioquia started in it.
9
Edificio Coltejer
The tallest building in the city, shaped as a needle, built by the textile company that made Medellin rich before anything else did.
10
Parque de las Luces
Three hundred illuminated poles standing in a square that was the most feared in the city. The lights were the intervention and they worked.

sleepntripFree cancellationEvery room we sell cancels for free

Plans change? Until the date on the card it costs nothing.

Find a room

What is an audio walk?

Tours in Medellin →

A guide in your headphones: open the walk on our site, walk from stop to stop, and at each one your phone tells its story. No guide, no group, and free. This is the first walk in Medellin:

Free walking tours in Medellin

The Centre and the Sculptor

Plaza Botero · Twenty-three bronzes standing in the open with no barrier, given by Botero to the city he was born in. He also gave Bogota a museum, and the two donations together are among the largest gifts any artist has made to his own country. He always denied painting fat people: he said he inflated volume as a formal device, the way a sculptor exaggerates mass, and these are the pieces that make the argument.
Palacio de la Cultura · The black and white striped building facing the square was designed by the Belgian architect Agustin Goovaerts in the nineteen-twenties and never built to his plan: the money ran out and the back half is a different building from a different decade. Go in and look up the spiral staircase, which is the one piece that was finished as drawn.
Museo de Antioquia · The second oldest museum in Colombia, and the indoor half of the Botero donation. The regional collection is the part worth time: Antioquia got rich twice, first on gold mined by enslaved and freed Africans in the west of the department, and then on textiles, and the museum is honest about the first.
Parque de las Luces · This square, Plaza Cisneros, was for years the most feared place in the city. The intervention was not policing: in 2005 the city planted three hundred illuminated poles, up to twenty-four metres tall, that light the whole square at night, and put a library and a school on two of its sides. Light and institutions, nothing else, and the square changed.
Catedral Metropolitana · Built between 1875 and 1931 and made of about one million one hundred and twenty thousand fired bricks, which makes it one of the largest brick buildings on earth. The brick is not decoration: there is no good building stone in this valley and there is excellent clay, so Medellin is a brick city from the cathedral down to the hillside barrios.
Placita de Florez · The flower market, and the reason flowers matter here. Every August the city holds the Feria de las Flores and its centrepiece is the silleteros parade: growers from the mountain village of Santa Elena carry enormous flower arrangements on their backs on a wooden frame called a silleta. The silleta was not invented for flowers. It was a chair strapped to a man back, used to carry people and goods over mountains where no road existed, including by the Spanish, who were carried.

Up the Hill

This is the route that made Medellin famous for something other than cocaine, and it is a transport route: the city decided that the problem with the barrios on the steep hillsides was that nobody could get out of them in the morning, and it built cable cars as public transport to fix it. Your metro ticket covers the whole thing. Half a day. Go with a guide who lives in Comuna 13, and pay that person directly.

Acevedo station · This is where the Metrocable starts, and it was the first cable car anywhere in the world built as mass public transport rather than as a tourist or ski lift. It opened in 2004, it is integrated into the metro fare, and it turned a journey of over an hour on foot and by informal minibus into seven minutes. Dozens of cities from Rio to La Paz to Mexico City have copied it since.
Santo Domingo Savio · Look down the valley from the platform. Everything you can see was built without permission, by people who arrived with nothing, and much of it by families displaced from the countryside by the war. Medellin has absorbed hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people, which is the single biggest fact about how these hillsides got built.
Biblioteca Espana · Three black blocks shaped like rocks, opened in 2007 by Giancarlo Mazzanti, and for a decade the photograph that represented Medellin in every architecture magazine. Then the stone cladding started coming off the facade and the building was closed for safety in 2013. It has stayed shut for years. Both halves of that are the real story of social urbanism: the idea worked and the maintenance did not.
Comuna 13 escalators · Six sections of outdoor escalator, three hundred and eighty-four metres long, opened in 2011 to replace three hundred and fifty concrete steps that took residents about half an hour to climb. They cost a fraction of a road and nothing like it existed before. In October 2002 this neighbourhood was the target of Operation Orion, a military assault with helicopters and about a thousand troops; the death toll and the number of people who disappeared are still disputed, and excavations have been carried out at a landfill above the barrio called La Escombrera, looking for bodies.
Moravia · This hill is a rubbish dump. It was the municipal tip until 1984 and thousands of people lived on and from it. It was closed, the residents were partly relocated, and the mound was planted as a garden — specifically with plants chosen to stabilise the slope and draw contaminants out of the ground. The hill is still making methane underneath.
Parque Arvi · A second cable car from Santo Domingo carries you out of the city altogether into sixteen hundred hectares of protected forest at twenty-five hundred metres. There are pre-Hispanic stone paths and canals in it, built by the people who were here before Medellin, and they were only mapped properly in the last twenty years. It is cold up here; bring a layer.

What the City Will Not Sell You

Medellin had the highest murder rate of any city in the world in 1991, at around three hundred and eighty per hundred thousand people. It has fallen by roughly ninety-five per cent since. The visitor industry built on that history mostly sells one man as entertainment, and the city has decided, at a policy level, not to. This route is the version Medellin actually offers about itself. Three hours, with two metro legs, and it is the route that will stay with you.

Museo Casa de la Memoria · Built by the city for the victims of the conflict, free, and it names nobody as a hero. The number to hold on to is from the national victims registry: more than nine million registered victims in Colombia, the large majority of them displaced from their land rather than killed, and a very large share of those arrived in this valley and built the hillsides you saw yesterday.
Parque Inflexion · Escobar lived in a tower here called the Monaco, which was car-bombed by a rival cartel in 1988. The building stood empty for thirty years and became a stop on narco tours. In February 2019 the city demolished it on live television, deliberately, and built a memorial park for the victims of the cartels on the ground. The mayor said the point was to leave nothing to photograph. There is a viewpoint and a list of names.
Metro Parque Berrio · Ride one stop and watch the carriage. There is no litter, nobody eats, nobody puts their feet up, and people queue. This is called Cultura Metro and it was taught on purpose from 1995: staff on platforms, school programmes, and a deliberate campaign that the metro was something the city owned and had to be worth keeping. Thirty years later it holds, and it is the clearest working example in Colombia that civic behaviour can be built.
Cementerio de San Pedro · From 1842, with Italian marble over the families who built the city on gold and then on cloth. It runs night tours with theatre among the tombs, which sounds tasteless and is in fact how the city processes its own dead: the cemetery is officially a museum and the point is that the twentieth century is buried here too.
Jardin Botanico and the Orquideorama · Colombia has more orchid species than any other country, somewhere above four thousand, and the national flower is one of them. The canopy over the collection here, built in 2006, is made of ten wooden hexagons shaped like flower-trees with no walls at all, so the structure shelters the orchids while leaving them in open air. It is on most lists of the best buildings in South America this century.
Cerro Nutibara · From the top you see the shape of the problem and the shape of the answer in one view: a valley about ten kilometres wide with mountain walls on both sides, nearly four million people in it, and the poorest neighbourhoods are the ones highest up the slopes, because that is the land nobody wanted. Everything the city built — the metro along the floor, the cable cars up the walls, the escalators in Comuna 13 — is a response to that geometry.

sleepntripNine conditionsA double bed and your own shower. Always.

A hotel, not a hostel. Air con, Wi-Fi, a score of 8 or more.

How we choose

Getting to Medellin and getting around

Jose Maria Cordova Airport · The international airport is not in Medellin: it is thirty-five kilometres east and nine hundred metres higher, up in Rionegro. Allow an hour and expect it to be cold.
Olaya Herrera Airport · The old airport, inside the city, now domestic only. Landing here means threading into a valley between two mountain walls.
Terminal del Norte · Buses north and east, including Guatape and Santa Fe de Antioquia. Attached to Caribe metro station.
Metro Parque Berrio · The only metro in Colombia, opened 1995, and the cleanest public transport you will use anywhere. Nobody eats or litters on it, and that is deliberate.
Metrocable to Santo Domingo · The first cable car anywhere built as mass public transport rather than a tourist ride, opened 2004. Your metro ticket covers it.
San Javier station · The metro stop for Comuna 13, and the connecting cable car above it. Twenty minutes from the centre for about a dollar.

Cheap eats in Medellin

Paisa food was designed for men who walked mules over mountains for a week, and it has not been adjusted since. The national tray, bandeja paisa, is roughly a day of calories on one plate and locals will tell you plainly that nobody eats it twice in a week. Everything is built on beans, maize, pork and plantain. The counter to eat at is a fonda or a market stall, two to five dollars, and the one thing to understand first is the arepa: the paisa version is thin, unsalted and has nothing inside it, which is the opposite of the Venezuelan and the coastal ones, and it is bread, not a dish.

Bandeja paisa · A tray: beans, rice, chicharron, chorizo, blood sausage, fried egg, avocado, plantain and an arepa
Arepa paisa · Thin, unsalted, nothing inside it, eaten with butter and salty cheese; fifty cents
Mondongo · Tripe soup with potato, carrot and coriander, served with rice and avocado on the side; four dollars
Sancocho antioqueno · The Sunday river soup: beef ribs, yuca, plantain and maize, cooked outdoors over wood
Chicharron · Pork belly with the skin on, puffed and shattering; the single item that judges a kitchen here
Buñuelos and natilla · A fried cheese ball and a maize custard; strictly December food and sold all year anyway
Tinto and the coffee question · Antioquia is coffee country, and the good beans left. That has changed in the last fifteen years
Aguardiente Antioqueno · The departmental anise spirit, drunk in small cups from a bottle on the table, never mixed
Fonda counters, Plaza Minorista · Thirty lunch stalls inside the produce market; point at the pot, three dollars, no English
Desserts at San Antonio de Pereira · A whole village square of dessert shops near the airport; obleas, arequipe, figs in syrup

Museums in Medellin

Medellin has one great gift and one hard room. The gift is Botero, who was born here and gave the city twenty-three bronzes for the open square plus the collection indoors. The hard room is the Casa de la Memoria, built by the city for the victims of its own war, and it is the museum that explains the rest of the city. Between them sits the thing Medellin has decided not to put in a museum at all: there is no Escobar museum here, and the apartment tower that was becoming one was demolished on purpose.

Museo de Antioquia · The Botero donation indoors plus the regional collection; second oldest museum in Colombia
Plaza Botero · Twenty-three bronzes outdoors with no barrier; free, always open, and people climb on them
Museo Casa de la Memoria · Free, built by the city for the victims of the conflict, and it names no heroes
Parque Inflexion · The empty block where the Monaco tower stood until the city demolished it in 2019
Museo de Arte Moderno · In a converted steel mill; strong on Colombian video, and the conversion is half the exhibit
Palacio de la Cultura · Belgian-designed, black and white striped, and never finished to the plan; climb the spiral
Cementerio Museo San Pedro · Officially a museum; Italian marble, the founding families, and night tours with theatre
Parque Explora · Four red boxes with the largest freshwater aquarium in South America inside; Amazon fish

Nature and day trips near Medellin

The one geographic fact that explains Medellin is that it is in a hole. The Aburra valley is about ten kilometres wide with mountain walls on both sides, the city floor is at fourteen hundred and ninety-five metres, and the rim is a thousand metres above that. That shape gives the eternal spring — twenty-two degrees every day, no seasons — and it also traps the air, which is why the valley has a serious pollution problem in the two dry windows of the year. Everything green here is either on a hill inside the city or over the rim.

Parque Arvi · Sixteen hundred hectares of protected forest at twenty-five hundred metres, reached by cable car
Cerro Nutibara · A hill in the middle of the city; the whole valley from the top and it costs nothing
Cerro El Volador · The bigger, wilder city hill, and an archaeological site; pre-Hispanic burials on the summit
Jardin Botanico · Free; Colombia has more orchid species than any country on earth and the house here shows them
Piedra del Penol · A granite monolith two hundred and twenty metres high with seven hundred and forty steps in a crack
Embalse de Guatape · Everything you see from the rock was a valley until 1978; a town is under the water
Santa Elena · The mountain village the silleteros come from; flower farms, and some open to visitors
Jardin · Seventy-seven kilometres south, coffee country, and a square that is still the social life

Holy places in Medellin

Antioquia is the most devout department in Colombia and also the one with the most separate identity, and the two are connected. The paisas were mountain people cut off by terrain from Bogota and the coast, they built their own economy on mules and their own church culture on top of it, and they are still distinct in accent, food and self-image. The religious objects here are not grand colonial churches, because there was no colonial wealth in this valley. They are the brick cathedral, the mule-driver saints, and a flower parade in August that is older than it looks.

Catedral Metropolitana · About one million one hundred and twenty thousand fired bricks; one of the largest brick buildings anywhere
Basilica de la Candelaria · The oldest church in the city, eighteenth century, and the cathedral until 1931
Iglesia de San Ignacio · A Jesuit church and cloister; the University of Antioquia began inside it
The silleteros · August flower parade; growers carry arrangements weighing up to seventy kilos on their backs
Cementerio de San Pedro · From 1842; the gold and textile families under Italian marble, and it is a museum now
Jerico and the carriel · Still makes the leather carriel bag of the Antioquian muleteer, with its seven hidden compartments
Santa Fe de Antioquia · The colonial capital until 1826, fifty kilometres west; two colonial churches and real heat
Guatape zocalos · Every house carries a painted relief panel along its base saying what the family did

Things to do in Medellin with kids

Medellin is the easiest big city in Colombia with children, for three reasons: the weather never changes and never gets hot, the metro and the cable cars are clean, cheap and themselves an attraction, and the city spent two decades deliberately building public things for families — a science centre, an aquarium, a planetarium and a barefoot park all within a few metro stops of each other in the north. The altitude is low enough here that nobody feels it.

Parque Explora · The largest freshwater aquarium in South America, plus three floors you are meant to touch
Metrocable ride · A glass cabin over the rooftops for the price of a metro ticket; the best value ride in Colombia
Planetario de Medellin · Next door to Explora; shows in Spanish and the dome carries it anyway
Pies Descalzos · Walk barefoot through sand, water and bamboo; shoes off at the gate and it is free
Parque Norte · The old-fashioned city funfair next to the botanical garden; rides, a lake and pedal boats
Jardin Botanico · Free, flat, full of iguanas and turtles, and the orchid canopy is a good place to sit out rain
Pueblito Paisa · A replica village on a hilltop with the whole valley below; staged, and children do not mind
Piedra del Penol steps · Seven hundred and forty steps up a rock; count them out loud and the day is solved

Nightlife in Medellin

There are two nights here and the difference matters. El Poblado and Parque Lleras is the foreigner night: dollar prices, English menus, and a scene that has drawn enough unpleasant tourism that locals increasingly avoid it. Carrera 70 in Laureles and the streets around the stadium are the Medellin night: cheaper, louder, almost entirely Colombian, and where people actually dance. The music is not salsa, which belongs to Cali; here it is reggaeton, and Medellin is where most of the world reggaeton is now produced.

Carrera 70 · The local strip by the stadium: cheap, loud, Colombian, and nothing starts before eleven
Reggaeton and the Medellin sound · J Balvin, Maluma, Karol G and Feid are all from here, and so are most of the producers
El Poblado and Parque Lleras · The foreigner night. Prices in dollars, and locals will tell you why they stopped coming
Mercado del Rio · Forty counters in a converted warehouse; eat first here, then go somewhere to drink
Aguardiente for the table · A bottle, a bucket of ice, small cups, and whoever sits nearest pours for everyone
Estadio on a derby night · Two clubs share the ground and the derby splits families; tickets are a few dollars
Tango in Manrique · Carlos Gardel died in a plane crash in Medellin in 1935, and this city has danced tango since
Sabaneta on a Sunday · A town at the end of the metro line where the square drinks all Sunday afternoon; entirely local

sleepntripApartmentsA whole apartment instead of a room

For a week in one city, when you want more space than a room.

To the apartments

Frequently asked questions about Medellin

What is there to see in Medellin?

The top sights in Medellin are Plaza Botero, Museo de Antioquia and Palacio de la Cultura. The full list on this page has 10 sights, each with a photo and a short note.

How many days do you need in Medellin?

Three to four days are enough to see the best of Medellin without rushing, including at least one walking tour.

Is there a free walking tour in Medellin?

Yes. sleepntrip has 3 free audio walks in Medellin, with no guide and no group: your phone tells the story at every stop. The first one: The Centre and the Sculptor.

How do you get to Medellin and get around?

The main ways are Jose Maria Cordova Airport, Olaya Herrera Airport and Terminal del Norte. Full details are in the transport section on this page.

Where to stay in Medellin, and for how much?

sleepntrip shows only rooms in Medellin that meet nine conditions: a good location, high guest scores, cleanliness, and a price of up to $80 a night for two. Pick your dates and see what is free.

Looking for a hotel in Medellin for your dates?

Only rooms that meet nine conditions, up to $80 a night.

All hotels in Medellin

Plan a trip across ColombiaColor, coffee and Caribbean rhythm→