Published on 03/08/2026
Comuna 13 was for years the most violent neighbourhood in Medellín. Today it's one of the most visited places in Colombia. That transformation, not the murals, is the real reason to come.
It's a neighbourhood built on the western slope of the Aburrá valley, largely by families displaced by the armed conflict. Its recent history explains a great deal of the country's recent history.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Comuna 13 was controlled by armed groups fighting over a strategic position: the slope opens onto the road west out of the country.
In October 2002 the state launched Operation Orión, a large-scale military intervention inside the neighbourhood. It was the biggest ever carried out in an urban area in Colombia, and it remains the subject of debate and legal proceedings over the disappearances that occurred during and after it.
What came next is what makes this place remarkable. Rather than being abandoned, the neighbourhood received public investment in infrastructure and transport, and its residents answered with art, music and community tourism.
They're the symbol of the change. Six flights of open-air escalators climbing the hillside, replacing some 350 concrete steps.
It may sound trivial. It isn't: getting home used to mean twenty or thirty minutes of steep stairs carrying the shopping. For older residents and for people working down in the city, they changed daily life. They were among the first of their kind installed in a working-class neighbourhood anywhere in the world.
By public transport it's straightforward:
A metro ticket costs between 4,000 and 4,500 COP per journey, depending on the card you use. Metro and buses run roughly 4:30 am to 11:00 pm.
Prices are indicative and may change.
The Medellín metro, incidentally, deserves attention in its own right. It's a genuine source of local pride: you'll notice it's spotless and that nobody eats on board. They call it cultura metro.
Yes, during the day and along the visited areas. Thousands of people come each week and tourism is now an important source of income for the neighbourhood.
That said, it remains a living working-class neighbourhood, not a theme park:
This is the visit where going alone versus going with someone makes the biggest difference — and not for safety reasons.
The murals record specific events: disappearances, displacement, people's names. Without someone to explain what each one represents, you see colours. With the explanation, you see a history that still hurts.
Many Comuna 13 guides grew up here and lived through Operation Orión as children. Hearing it from someone who was inside it is nothing like reading a plaque.
There's also this: money from tours run by people from the neighbourhood stays in the neighbourhood. That difference matters.
Weekday mornings are considerably quieter. Sunday afternoons are the busiest, though also the liveliest, with the most live music.
Allow three to four hours to do it properly, including getting there from central Medellín.
Avoid tours selling Comuna 13 as "Pablo Escobar's neighbourhood" or built around drug trafficking. In Medellín that narrative causes real offence, and rightly so: it reduces an entire city to the worst chapter of its history, told from the point of view of the man who inflicted it.
The story worth telling here is that of the people who rebuilt the neighbourhood. It's far more interesting.
