Medellin!   Sunday 07/08/2022

Well, a trip to Medellin. So interesting to see a place that is really hyped as the best city in Colombia. Is it?

There are some very significant pluses. It’s location is lovely, occupying a whole valley at the northern end of the Andes mountain range. It’s climate is wonderful – it’s called “The City of Eternal Spring” because year-round the daily maximum is about 27 degrees and the minimum about 17. The atmosphere of the city is great – it’s energetic and the people are noticeably friendly and kind. It is famed for its night life (which I confess is not of great interest to me – but it’s very easy to see why young Western tourists love the place… even though I think they love it not because it’s Colombian, but rather because it’s very much aimed at their tastes. As a city, Medellin has apparently always had a very entrepreneurial streak!). 

The city, which numbers about 2.5 million people, has had extraordinary success in recovering from the dark days of the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, when it became the cocaine capital of the world. It was riddled with violence perpetrated by both drug barons and various guerrilla factions, often in league with each other. Reportedly, it’s difficult to get older city residents to talk at all about the past – such was the trauma. By 1991 Medellin had by far the highest murder rate in the world, 266 per 100,000 inhabitants per year. To put this in perspective, in 2019 the city with the world’s highest murder rate was Tijuana in Mexico, at 134 per 100,000 (Cape Town in South Africa ranked 8th at 68, St Louis in the USA 9th at 64 and my home town of Durban 35th at 40 – Durban has certainly improved too!).

The transformation has been extensive. A lot of credit has been given to the decision to build a metro system and, in particular, the farsighted decision to extend this system to the poorest barrios (what would be called favelas in Brazil). These crime-ridden ghettoes were on the outskirts of the city, and because of the geography they sprawled up the mountainsides. Running train lines up mountains is rather difficult, so the metro system has five metrocable extensions – literally cable cars, the same you would find in European or US ski resorts. So, where the barrios had been cut off from the city, they were now integrated. This had two effects: firstly, psychological: it encouraged a new civic pride that prompted the poor residents of these areas to actively oppose the crime that blighted their lives, helping the authorities to largely defeat it. And secondly it meant that these people could now travel anywhere in the city to get work.

So successful was this new transport system that it has been copied in a number of Latin American cities: Lima, Caracas and Rio de Janeiro among them, albeit with mixed results. In Rio, it was a total failure: the populations of the favelas largely ignored it and the whole system has fallen into disrepair and no longer operates. Which I suppose shows that good ideas that work in one place don’t necessarily work in another – local cultural factors are really the decider. Anyway, alongside the metro system, Medellin’s city government also embarked on an ambitious social upliftment programme, focused on education, healthcare and housing – and the simple fact is that they have actually delivered (take note South Africa!). Poverty rates over the last 20 years have plummeted, from 50% of the population in 2002 to 15% in 2014. Almost 99% of households have electricity and 97% running water. So successful has the city been that it has won numerous International urban planning and development awards and is considered to be the template for meaningful development across the whole of Latin America. 

There are negatives. One thing that immediately made me curious is the absence of an old town. The centre of the city, it’s oldest part, is quite frankly a mess. There’s the occasional old building, but surrounded by awful run-down 1960s and 1970s concrete architecture. Everything looks tacky and dirty, street vendors spill everywhere, including the main plazas, and there are constant traffic jams, old vehicles spewing out clouds of smoke. Trying to find out why there isn’t an old town was not easy – Googling the subject typically just gives you endless tourist-focused tips on walking tours of the “historical centre”, without explaining why there isn’t one! My suspicion was that a city so focused on the future had simply lacked the energy to preserve its past. Eventually I found a helpful article, quoting a professor of architecture at the National University. He said that people often suppose what I had, but that does not actually explain it – Medellin was pulling down its old buildings for decades before the troubles started! Apparently the city has always had a desire to be modern and up-to-date and as a result very few buildings ever got beyond 50 or 60 years old. So there’s the explanation. And given that historical districts are so crucial in attracting tourists to Cartagena and Bogotá, it seems that Medellin has no choice but to emphasise its modern credentials and remain very quiet about what it has done to its history! (And just to make something clear: I do not believe for one moment that preserving history means that you are then backward-looking and don’t care about progress or the future. You can do both, and in fact cities across the world do – the typical setup is an old town in the historic centre, often surrounded by hideous newer areas: Eastern Europe is a good example. Asia’s obsession with progress makes it more similar to Medellin, although in Asia most old buildings were made of pretty thin wood and paper and were not built to last more than say 30 years). 

So: a mixed picture. I was surprised at what a mess the centre of the city is, not helped by some huge roads criss-crossing it. One more honest tourist website said “ Medellin is not really a city for walking”. An understatement! But, being me, I did walk – regardless. On my first full day I walked 19km (12 miles), which gave a pretty good perspective. I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to normal tourists. Getting across some of these roads was not easy: you had to seize the moment and make a dash across 3 or 4 lanes for the central reservation, and then repeat! Also, most of the time you are walking through very undistinguished streets – endless motorbike repair shops and other dingy premises, broken pavements and cars parked everywhere. But to me that’s actually quite interesting – I like peering into places and seeing what’s up, seeing how people behave on the streets.

Fortunately I had done enough research before coming and therefore stayed in a lovely area about 3km from the centre. (People who don’t do any research and just book something in the centre get a horrible surprise when they arrive – as well as discovering that the streets are absolutely not safe to walk after dark). My area Laureles is totally safe and has quiet tree-lined streets containing mainly good quality apartment buildings, and in its centre a few dozen restaurants and bars. It’s what you could call a nice middle class area, in a city which is absolutely not middle class. Out of interest I visited the other decent area where tourists mostly stay, El Pablado. That is focused much more on younger tourists – it’s brash and noisy and full of night clubs (and more expensively priced restaurants and bars, many classic tourist traps). For me, I’d chosen right; if I was advising someone of 25 or 30 I’d suggest El Pablado, which will be more fun. What was interesting walking around there was that I chanced on the new business centre of the city: many large modern office blocks where all the major companies seem to operate from. It was similar in a way to London’s Canary Wharf or Paris’s La Defence, although more attractive than both (especially La Defence, which is bloody awful!). Very similar to what the trend has been in South African cities. Well maintained streets, everything green, lots of trees. There’s no surprise that people in well-paid jobs don’t want to go anywhere near the city centre. 

On Wednesday I travelled out of the city up to Parque Arvi, a huge nature reserve on one of the mountains above the city. This was especially interesting because it meant taking first the metro and then the metrocable. The first part of the metrocable goes up to Santo Domingo, a sprawling barrio that used to be the city’s most dangerous, and then you change to a second cable car line that takes you up to the park for an additional and much higher fare. The great thing about being in a cable car is that you can see the barrio extremely well – at times you are only 3 or 4 metres above the roofs of the houses – you can literally see inside, see people living their daily lives. So no need to chance walking the streets. It was a fantastic ride, and once you get high up you have a perfect view of the whole city. Up there you’re in pine forest and fresh air and it’s much cooler, at midday 22 degrees compared to 27 down below. The park is between 500 and 800 metres higher than the centre of Medellin, which sits at 1,500 metres above sea level.

Well then – and sorry that this has been so long! – what do I conclude from all this? Certainly a fascinating city to visit. I suppose you could say it’s reality: there are positives and negatives. Tourist information of course is heavily biased towards promoting the positives – and I think that many people just unquestioningly parrot what they are told. (And also, to be fair, most visitors will be on holiday for just a week or two and are in Medellin for a few days to simply have a good time – if there’s a weirdo in this piece it’s me!). To simplify matters, and you can’t get away from this sort of question: which city did you like best? I would say Bogota, over both Cartagena and Medellin. And that is despite its cold climate (relatively speaking, given that we’re in the tropics). You could call Bogota “The City of Eternal Winter”! 

A final, and I think sobering, observation. Walking through a pretty rough area on Thursday on the way to a stop for the airport bus, I came across a group of what I’d call “the plastic bottle collectors”. You see these men in all Colombian cities, so this is not a particular Medellin thing at all. The authorities (admirably) clearly pay these people, either by weight or by volume, I can’t say, for collecting plastic bottles. It has a great effect – it’s one reason why the streets of Colombian cities are relatively litter-free – and presumably the bottles are recycled. But these poor people are at the very bottom of society. Ragged clothing, sometimes barefoot, stick thin, filthy dirty (no electricity or running water for them – they clearly sleep on the street). They tote these huge white sacks that are about 1.5 metres high and 1.5 metres in diameter, filled with plastic bottles. They are the most pitiful human beings imaginable – nowhere outside of India have I seen such obviously degraded people. As I said to my friend John on the phone yesterday, if you or I were to find ourselves in that position and know that we had little prospect of anything better, we would very quickly find a length of rope or wire and hang ourselves from the nearest tree. If you need to be reminded, you were born under a lucky star. 

And so I boarded my plane and flew back down to the searing heat of the coast, sobered but pleased with what I had seen.