El Centro & Transformation

Botero donated the first batch of sculptures to the city in 2000, then added more in subsequent years. He asked for nothing in return, only that the works remain accessible to everyone, free, day and night. On any given afternoon, you will see children climbing on the sculptures, teenagers taking selfies with the cat, couples leaning against the enormous hand. This is exactly what Botero intended. He grew up poor in this neighbourhood, and he wanted his art to belong to the neighbourhood's people, not to a museum where admission would keep them out.

The plaza itself sits at the boundary between the historic centre and the more modern commercial city. Around you are vendors selling fresh juices, coffee in small plastic cups, and the empanadas that are Medellín's street food signature. The air smells of aguapanela and exhaust and bougainvillea somewhere overhead. This sensory mix — beauty and chaos, art and commerce — is Medellín at its most honest.

When you are ready, walk to the northeastern corner of the plaza. That neoclassical building with the tiled facade is the Museo de Antioquia, your next stop.

Beyond the Botero rooms, the museum holds a strong collection of Colombian art spanning several centuries — colonial religious painting, nineteenth-century academic work, and twentieth-century modernism. The paintings give you a compressed visual history of how Colombians have seen themselves across generations. But it is the Botero rooms that most visitors come for, and they deserve the time.

Stand in front of one of his large oil paintings and let yourself adjust to the scale. These are not delicate works. They are physically imposing, painted with the confidence of someone who has spent decades being certain about his vision. The colours — deep ochres, warm reds, tropical greens — feel simultaneously European in technique and entirely Colombian in temperature. Botero absorbed the Italian Renaissance masters he saw on his first trip to Europe and sent them back through his own palette.

The museum also holds several works that address the violence Medellín experienced. Botero's 'Mona Lisa at Age Twelve,' painted during the worst years of cartel terror, takes the most recognisable image in Western art and makes it childhood innocence in the middle of horror. The quiet of the museum gallery is its own argument about what endures.

The building is named for Rafael Uribe Uribe, a Colombian general and liberal politician who was assassinated in 1914, whose progressive politics — including early advocacy for workers' rights and land reform — made him both celebrated and controversial in his time. His name on this building connects the archive to a lineage of Antioquian political thought that long predates the crises of the late twentieth century.

Inside, the main hall with its tiled floors and soaring arched ceilings gives you a sense of institutional ambition. The regional archive holds documents going back to the colonial period — the paper record of Antioquia's history before and after the coffee boom, before and after the violence, all carefully catalogued in a building designed to impress upon visitors that the past is worth preserving.

Step back outside and look up and down the street. This block, with the museum behind you and the palace in front, represents the cultural core that Medellín's civic founders built in the early twentieth century, long before the name of this city became synonymous with murder.

Botero's response was both artistic and political. He donated a new bird sculpture to replace the destroyed one, but he insisted that the damaged original remain exactly where it was — its metal skin torn open, the blast holes visible, the bronze shrapnel preserved. Both sculptures stand side by side today. The destroyed bird is a memorial. The new bird is a statement that the city continues.

Standing between the two birds, you are standing inside Medellín's most honest monument to its own history. This park does not sanitise what happened here. It makes you look at the damage directly. Many Colombian cities and many post-conflict societies choose to remove the evidence of violence, to build a clean narrative of renewal. Medellín chose to keep the torn sculpture in public view, in a park where children play, so that the memory stays embedded in daily life.

The park today is also a gathering point for political demonstrations and cultural events. On weekends it fills with families, evangelical preachers, political activists, and the general public life of a city that has reclaimed its streets.

The Metro de Medellín, whose elevated track and stations run just north of here, opened in 1995 — during the worst years of the violence and immediately after the killing of Pablo Escobar. This was not an accident of timing. The metro was a deliberate statement by civic leaders that the city was building for a future, that investment in public infrastructure was itself an act of defiance against the forces trying to make Medellín ungovernable. It remains the only metro system in Colombia.

Stand in the plaza and take in the scale. The government buildings are large, the plaza is large, the sky above Medellín's mountain valley is large. The city's famous eternal spring climate — Medellín sits at 1,495 metres in a valley that catches mountain breezes while staying warm enough for flowering trees year-round — makes even bureaucratic space feel pleasant. The temperature today, as always, is probably in the low-to-mid twenties Celsius.

Fajardo's strategy — which he refined as mayor from 2004 to 2007 and continued as governor of Antioquia — was built on a counter-intuitive premise: invest the most in the places that have been most neglected. Build the best architecture in the poorest comunas. Put the finest library in the most violent hillside barrio. The logic was that visible public investment signals respect and that beautiful public spaces create the conditions for social trust to rebuild.

Whether the transformation was driven by urban design or by other factors — demobilisation of paramilitary groups, government security operations, changes in the drug trade itself, significant investments in education — is a debate that urban planners and social scientists continue. What is not debated is that the murder rate in Medellín fell from 381 per 100,000 people in 1991 to under 25 by the 2010s. The change was real, and it was one of the most dramatic urban turnarounds in recorded history.

Standing outside, look at the building's relationship to the street. The teatro occupies a prominent position in the northern part of the centro, and its broad entrance steps and open forecourt create the kind of civic arrival sequence that treats a night at the theatre as a public occasion, not just a private entertainment. This deliberate placement of cultural institutions in the urban fabric — rather than hidden in a park or on the edge of the city — is something Medellín has done consistently.

The neighbourhood around the theatre, in the neighbourhood of Villanueva, mixes residential, commercial, and cultural uses in the way that the best of Medellín's pre-crisis fabric operated. Even during the worst years of violence, this part of the city maintained a degree of daily life — people going to work, going to school, attending concerts — that speaks to the resilience of urban routine as a form of collective survival.

The philosophy behind the network goes back to the same civic logic as the urban acupuncture projects: that access to culture is not a luxury but a right, and that providing quality cultural infrastructure in working-class neighbourhoods treats those communities with the same seriousness as the city centre. During the years of peak violence, many of these spaces functioned as refuges — places where young people could be inside, learning something, rather than on streets controlled by armed groups.

Walk through the streets around this area and notice the murals. Street art in Medellín is not decoration. It is documentation. You will see commemorative murals for people who were killed during the violence, murals celebrating community leaders, murals depicting the city's natural landscape — the mountains, the birds, the flowers of the Andes. The walls of the centro are a running narrative that the official history books only partially capture.

Inside, the museum houses an aquarium — one of the largest freshwater aquariums in Latin America — a planetarium, and an extensive collection of interactive science and technology exhibits. The permanent collection is genuinely excellent, not a collection of dusty models but hands-on, well-maintained, and designed for both children and adults. The temporary exhibitions rotate and have included displays on the biodiversity of Colombia's ecosystems — extraordinary in a country that contains ten percent of the world's species.

What Parque Explora also represents is a shift in how Medellín's civic leadership thought about public investment. The traditional approach to urban renewal focuses on security, housing, and basic services — the necessary minimum. The approach that emerged in Medellín under Fajardo and subsequent mayors went further: it argued that people in the city's most difficult neighbourhoods deserved access to wonder, to science, to the kind of institutions that expand what a young person imagines is possible for their own life. The building cost more than it needed to. That was the point.

Santo Domingo Savio was, in the 1990s, one of the most violent neighbourhoods on earth. The murder rate here was higher than almost anywhere in a city whose citywide rate was already the worst in the world. The comunas — the informal hillside settlements that ring Medellín's valley — were largely controlled by gangs and paramilitaries. The state's presence was minimal and often predatory. Children who grew up here had narrow options and short life expectancies.

Pablo Escobar was born in the Antioquia region, though not in Medellín itself, and he used the comunas as a base for recruiting and for community patronage — building football pitches and housing in exchange for loyalty and impunity. His death on a Medellín rooftop on December 2, 1993, marked the end of the Medellín Cartel's dominance but not the end of violence: the organisation fragmented into smaller groups, and the killing continued for years. The city's transformation began not with Escobar's death but with the civic and political decisions made in the years that followed.

At the top station, you are standing beside what was the Biblioteca España — a striking black rock-shaped library building designed by architect Giancarlo Mazzanti, completed in 2007, which became the international symbol of the transformation. The building has since been closed for structural issues, but its significance endures: a world-class library built in the most marginalised corner of the most violent city on earth. From this vantage point, look down over the city — the valley, the metro line, the towers of the centro, the mountains beyond. You are looking at a city that decided to reinvent itself, and largely did. That story is complicated, incomplete, and ongoing. But the view from here is undeniable.