16 Best Things to Do in Medellín

Sixteen things worth doing in Medellín and the wider Antioquia region, with the numbers checked.

At a glance

Cultural and historical

Plaza Botero

23 bronze sculptures by Fernando Botero stand in the plaza in front of the Museo de Antioquia — donated by the artist and installed in 2002, across a public space of 8,000+ square metres that also wraps around the Palacio de la Cultura Rafael Uribe Uribe. The Museo de Antioquia maintains them every six months, following instructions Botero left himself (Medellín.Travel; Medellín Guru).

Seeing 23 works by an artist of Botero’s standing, outdoors and for free, is genuinely unusual.

Museo de Antioquia

Beside the plaza, holding Botero paintings and sculptures alongside pre-Columbian and contemporary Colombian art. It is the institution that cares for the plaza outside, so the two are best visited together.

El Castillo Museum

A Gothic-style house built in the 1930s in El Poblado, now a museum of European art and antique furniture with formal gardens. Quiet, and a complete contrast to the city below.

Pueblito Paisa

A replica of a traditional Antioquian village on top of Cerro Nutibara, worth the trip mostly for the panoramic view over the Aburrá Valley.

Outdoors

Parque Arví

Reached by Metrocable Line L from Santo Domingo — note this is a tourist line with its own fare, separate from the standard Metro ticket. The park protects 1,761 hectares of native and planted forest, with trails and weekend markets (Metro de Medellín).

Paragliding at San Félix

Tandem flights over the valley rim north-west of the city, run by operators at San Félix.

Comuna 13

A community-led graffiti tour through the neighbourhood, taking in the 384 metres of outdoor escalators that replaced 350 concrete steps. Go in the morning: the city’s own carrying-capacity study puts the sustainable limit at under 700 visitors a day against peak flows above 8,000 (Alcaldía de Medellín).

Day trips

Guatapé and the Piedra del Peñol

The climb up the Piedra is 740 steps, taking 15 to 30 minutes depending on pace, with rest points and viewpoints along the way. The staircase is built into a natural fissure in the rock face, added in the 1950s (Visit My Colombia). The view over the Guatapé reservoir at the top is the reason everyone comes.

The town itself, with its painted zócalos, is worth as much time as the rock.

Santa Fe de Antioquia

A preserved colonial town that served as capital of Antioquia from 1584 until 1826, when the capital moved to Medellín (Puente de Occidente / Comisión Fílmica Colombia).

Nearby is the Puente de Occidente, a suspension bridge over the Cauca River designed by the Colombian engineer José María Villa and built between 4 December 1887 and 27 December 1895, with a total length of 291 metres. At the time it was completed it was considered the largest structure of its kind in South America and among the ten largest in the world; it remains the longest wooden-decked suspension bridge in the Americas (Comisión Fílmica Colombia).

Jericó, Jardín, Hacienda Nápoles

Jericó (3 hours) is a mountain town of colonial streets and religious history, with coffee farms around it. Jardín (3.5 hours) is among Colombia’s most photographed towns, built around a main square with painted balconies. Hacienda Nápoles (2.5 hours), once Pablo Escobar’s estate, is now a theme park with a safari zoo and water park.

Understanding the Escobar years — accurately

Escobar tours are widely sold in Medellín, and this is the part of any Medellín guide most worth getting right.

The city’s position is not neutral toward them. The municipal administration demolished the Pablo Escobar museum at Loma del Indio as part of an explicit campaign against narco-tourism, and since 2021 has run a training programme to professionalise guides on the city’s actual history and heritage. El Colombiano has documented the distorted history told on many of these tours (El Colombiano; El Tiempo).

The Mónaco building no longer exists. The eight-storey block that was Escobar’s best-known residence and one of the most-visited stops on these tours was demolished with explosives, at a cost of 4,700 million pesos, and the site is now the Parque Memorial Inflexión — a memorial to the victims of the conflict rather than to the man who caused it.

That memorial is the recommendation here. Some operators do focus on victims’ memory and the city’s recovery; others are run by former traffickers or Escobar relatives and charge up to 1,000 dollars a head. If you want to understand this period, ask what the tour is about before booking, and consider the Museo Casa de la Memoria alongside it.

Food and markets

Plaza Minorista is one of the city’s largest markets and the best single place to meet Colombian produce — tropical fruit you will not recognise, street food, and ingredients explained by the people selling them. A bike tour with food stops covers similar ground across a wider area. Coffee farm tours in the surrounding hills run half or full day.

Booking tours

Several Medellín-based operators run the tours above:

• Medellín Travels
• LandVenture Travel
• Medellín VIP
• Colombia Travel Operator
• Medellín City Services
• Medellín Tours & Guides

Check current reviews and confirm directly with the operator that they run the specific tour you want. For Comuna 13, choose a guide from the neighbourhood — local guide associations regulate this, and it is where the money should go.

A note on this guide

Rechecked in September 2026. The item count, the Puente de Occidente’s status, and the Escobar tour section were corrected; travel times and durations are indicative and should be confirmed against current conditions.