Medellín – We Absolutely Loved This City

Our first full day started with a visit to a coffee plantation in the hills outside Medellín.

This was brilliant. Our guide was very funny and somehow managed to make learning about coffee genuinely entertaining. We learnt how coffee is grown, picked and roasted, and tried different coffees prepared in different ways, including the Japanese V60 and other brewing methods.

For me, though, it was the typical Colombian coffee — a lovely, medium roast — that was the standout.

I never have sugar in my coffee, but I do normally have milk. This coffee was so smooth and so nice that it really didn’t need it. And interestingly, it didn’t give you that huge caffeine hit either.

I think this may have been the first time I’ve really understood just how good a simple brown coffee — apparently we shouldn’t call it black! — can be.

From there we went to Comuna 13, and this was probably the Medellín I’d been hoping to see.

Colour, music, murals, dancing, people everywhere and an incredible atmosphere.

What’s hard to get your head around is that not that many years ago, this was an extremely dangerous place to live.

Our guide, Estefan, grew up in Medellín during the Pablo Escobar years — although he calls Escobar “Voldemort” — and the fighting between the various armed groups. Listening to him talk about what life was like as a child was fascinating because suddenly this wasn’t a Netflix series or a piece of Colombian history — it was someone’s childhood.

Today Comuna 13 feels almost the complete opposite. There are outdoor escalators carrying people up the incredibly steep hillside, fantastic street art, little shops and cafés, music everywhere and people who seem genuinely pleased that visitors want to come and see their neighbourhood.

Would I have wandered around there by myself? Probably not — although I suspect I would have been perfectly fine. I just wouldn’t have had a clue where I was going!

With a local guide, though, we loved every minute of it.

What struck us most was how recent it all was. While we were living our normal lives through the 1980s and early 1990s, people here were living with bombings, kidnappings and killings — and we were largely oblivious to it.

Almost everyone seemed to have lost someone, yet many people simply didn’t talk about what they’d experienced. The Memory project started with a bus going into communities, giving people a safe place to tell their stories and talk about what had happened to them. Eventually it grew into the museum it is today.

It certainly changed the way we looked at the city.

We then went to Comuna 3, which I absolutely loved.

One of the interesting things we’ve learnt is that homes and neighbourhoods in Colombia are classified into estratos, from 1 to 6, with 1 generally being the poorest areas and 6 the wealthiest.

Medellín is built in this huge valley with houses climbing right up the mountainsides, so you get this extraordinary view across communities that seem to go on forever.

I loved getting away from the polished parts of the city and seeing another side of how people actually live.

The people have been incredibly friendly and patient — particularly with our dreadful Spanish — and the more we’ve learnt about what Medellín and its people have been through, the more remarkable the city seems.