The valley that rebuilt itself
A city of red brick stacked up the walls of a narrow green valley, where public cable cars run as commuter transport and a hillside barrio that was once a war zone is now covered in murals. Medellín is the easiest city in Colombia to fall for — 22 °C every day of the year, and a civic story worth understanding properly.
Read this first
The useful version, including the parts that do not sell trips. If something here puts you off a plan, that is the page working.
Climate. The "city of eternal spring" — 17–28 °C all year. Wettest April–May and September–November.
Medellín was the most dangerous city on earth and is not any more. That transformation is the interesting story, and it belongs to the people who lived it. We do not run narco tours and we do not use that name to sell anything. Many Medellinenses find it genuinely offensive, and our guides will tell you why.
MDE sits on a plateau 45–60 minutes away through a mountain tunnel. Budget the time, and expect a 20 °C temperature swing between the terminal and El Poblado.
Around 4,000 visitors a day now walk through a residential neighbourhood. Go with a guide from the community, buy from the vendors there, and ask before photographing anyone. We only work with Comuna 13–based guide collectives.
El Poblado has a documented problem with drink-spiking and scopolamine robbery targeting foreign visitors, including through dating apps. Never leave a drink unattended, never go home with someone you met that night, and use a car we book rather than a street taxi.
31 experiences
Every one runs with a local guide. Filter, or tell us what you like and we will build the days around it.
Culture
The hillside barrio that went from the most feared address in Medellín to an open-air gallery, walked with someone who grew up in it. Outdoor escalators, murals with meanings, and the 2002 military operation told by the people it happened to.
From
$20–$45
per person
Food & Drink
The Graffitour route taken slowly and eaten through — mango biche with salt and lime, obleas, chorizo from the grill halfway up, and a cold Club Colombia at the top with the whole valley below you.
From
$30–$65
per person
Culture
Twenty-three fat bronze Boteros standing in a public square, and upstairs the best collection of Colombian art outside Bogotá. The museum also holds the country’s most uncomfortable modern painting, and we will show you it.
From
$8–$40
per person
Culture
The downtown most visitors are told to avoid, walked properly with a guide who can explain why it looks the way it does. Four hours through Parque Berrío, the Palacio, Botero’s square and the streets where the city actually works.
Suggested
$15–$30
pay what you think it was worth
Nature
A commuter cable car that climbs out of the valley, over the barrios, and deposits you in a cloud forest 2,000 metres up. Arví is a pre-Hispanic landscape of stone paths and silence, twenty minutes and a world away from Provenza.
From
$22–$75
per person
Nature
Fourteen hectares of tropical garden in the middle of the city, under a canopy of timber-and-steel "flower-trees" that is one of the best pieces of architecture in Colombia. Free, shaded, and full of iguanas.
Entry fee
Free entry
paid on the door
Nightlife
Two hours with a working dance teacher, then straight into a social where locals are actually dancing. Medellín dances salsa choque and bachata more than Cali-style salsa, and you will learn the difference the hard way.
From
$15–$45
per person
Food & Drink
Antioquian food is not subtle and does not apologise. A working tour of the downtown markets and fondas — arepas de choclo, chicharrón, mondongo, aguardiente and a bandeja paisa that will end your day.
From
$45–$85
per person
Food & Drink
Colombia has more edible fruit species than almost anywhere on earth, and most of them never leave the country. Two and a half hours tasting through a working wholesale market with someone who can name all of it.
From
$26–$40
per person
Nightlife
Provenza on a Friday is one of the great nights out in Latin America and also the most targeted few blocks in the country. We run it with a host who stays with the group from the first bar to the car home.
From
$45–$95
per person
Culture
You throw a lead disc at a clay pit packed with gunpowder envelopes, and when it detonates the whole room cheers. Tejo is free to play as long as you keep buying beer, which tells you everything about it.
From
$25–$55
per person
Culture
The museum Medellín built for its own victims — of the cartels, the paramilitaries, the guerrillas and the state. It is quiet, unsentimental and the single most useful hour you can spend understanding the city.
Entry fee
Free entry
paid on the door
Culture
The alternative to a narco tour, and the reason we do not run one. Five hours across the city with a guide who can explain how Medellín became the most dangerous city on earth and how it stopped — without turning anyone into a character.
From
$40–$110
per person
Food & Drink
Colombia exports its best coffee and drinks the rest, and that is changing fast. Ninety minutes in a specialty roastery cupping single-origin lots and learning to pull a decent shot yourself.
From
$22–$60
per person
Adventure
Twenty to thirty minutes off the San Félix ridge with the whole Aburrá Valley underneath you and Medellín laid out end to end. The take-off is two steps and then the ground is a long way down.
From
$55–$155
per person
Culture
The families above Medellín who carry vast flower arrangements on their backs through the August Feria de las Flores have been doing it for generations. You visit the farm, meet the growers, and build a silleta yourself.
From
$55–$135
per person
Food & Drink
Shop the market, then cook the most excessive plate in Colombian cuisine — beans, rice, chicharrón, chorizo, morcilla, egg, plantain, avocado and an arepa, all on one plate — and then eat it.
From
$55–$110
per person
Day Trip
A 220-metre granite monolith with 740 steps zigzagging up its face, and from the top an archipelago of flooded green valleys that looks unreal. Then Guatapé itself, where every building carries a painted zócalo panel.
From
$40–$110
per person
Day Trip
The old colonial capital of Antioquia, whitewashed and hot at 550 metres, with cobbled streets, four colonial churches, and a 291-metre suspension bridge from 1895 that was among the first of its kind in the Americas.
From
$40–$130
per person
Day Trip
A coffee town that has resisted being modernised, with a painted plaza where the whole town still sits out in the evening, two hand-built cable cars running up opposite valley walls, and some of the best coffee in Antioquia.
From
$45–$160
per person
Adventure
A river running clear over white marble through a jungle canyon, with grade II–III rapids and a cave system you enter by wading and swimming in the dark. It is the best adventure day within reach of Medellín and it is a very long one.
From
$60–$130
per person
Day Trip
A 1,000-hectare wildlife and water park at Puerto Triunfo, with African savannah enclosures, a large aquarium, water slides and a butterfly house. The estate was confiscated from Pablo Escobar in the 1990s; it has been a public park for far longer than it was ever his.
From
$65–$200
per person
Nature
Deep green river pools in the eastern Antioquian hills, surrounded by forest, where Medellinenses go at weekends to swim and cook by the water. Warm, low and about as far from a city as an hour and a half gets you.
From
$30–$75
per person
Food & Drink
Not a coffee museum — a family farm on a steep green slope where you pick, pulp, wash, dry, roast and finally drink, and where the grower explains what the price on your supermarket bag actually pays them.
From
$35–$145
per person
Adventure
Quad bikes on farm tracks and river crossings in the hills outside the city — mud, cloud forest, and viewpoints you would not otherwise reach. No licence needed, briefing included.
From
$55–$215
per person
Adventure
Grade II–IV rafting near Cocorná, an hour and a half from the city, through a warm forested gorge. Enough water to be genuinely exciting and enough guiding not to be stupid.
From
$50–$180
per person
Adventure
Abseiling down waterfalls in the Cocorná gorges, including one vertical drop of over eighty metres with the water hitting you the whole way. Full technical kit and guides who do this every day.
From
$60–$360
per person
Nature
Colombian criollo horses on forest tracks in the hills above the city, with valley views through the trees and a farm stop for coffee. Suitable for complete beginners and genuinely good for experienced riders too.
From
$45–$120
per person
Nature
Colombia has more bird species than any other country on earth — around 1,900 — and Antioquia holds a serious share of them. A full day with a specialist guide, a scope, and a genuine chance at endemics.
From
$90–$250
per person
Wellness
Thermal pools fed by volcanic groundwater in the hills, with a cold-water waterfall to alternate into if you want the full effect. The most restorative day available within reach of the city.
From
$35–$90
per person
Nightlife
An open-sided wooden bus painted in primary colours, a live band on board, aguardiente going round, and a slow loop of the city with everyone dancing in the aisle. Absurd, and genuinely a Colombian institution.
From
$28–$55
per person
Private & VIP
3 days · max 6 people
Three days in the valley with one guide and one driver who stay with you throughout — no shared minibuses, no 6am hotel-lobby roll call. Comuna 13 with a guide from the neighbourhood, Guatapé before the crowds, and a working coffee finca in the hills.
