Poblado – Let’s start our search for Medellin street art in the Poblado section of the city, because I am constantly hearing from other tourists that Poblado is the best part of the city: that it has the best restaurants, the best stores, and the glitziest night life. They crow that it is safe and beautiful, (for some reason tourists often collate “safe” with “beautiful”). Getting off the Metro at the Poblado stop, however,we are
Click on All Photos to Enlarge
seriously underwhelmed by what we see. First of all we have to make a long hot climb to arrive where the good life is supposed to reside, (this is one of a few wealthy neighborhoods that sit on the hillsides overlooking the city – most are poor favelas), and the first half dozen or so blocks of this climb pass mostly fast food joints, hardware stores, and car repair shops.The street next to us as we climb is usually choked with gasping traffic that stops and abruptly surges forward like blood cells pulsing through a tiny capillary. I admit that once we get above Parque El Poblado the area becomes a bit more flashy, and there is a great variety of prosperous looking restaurants and hotels, but there is a Coney Island vibe about the whole business. Further up the hill we will find Parque Lleras, which is completely surrounded by restaurants, bars, coffee shops, and discos. The area exudes an aroma of stale beer and roasting coffee, (which isn’t such a bad smell to be honest). The large numbers of attractive young people milling about, and a long line of porta potties along a wall on a side street tell us that the park must be Medellin’s “party central” at night. I can’t tell you if it does indeed become a wild and woolly party scene because the Metro shuts down at 11:00 pm, my Laurales apartment is too far away to walk home, and I have had a lot of miserable experiences with cab drivers in my travels. I just don’t think I’d have enough fun there to justify the cab ride. As we look around we see a number of ugly examples of rough “tagging” on some of the walls but find relatively few examples of well designed street art in the Poblado neighborhood. The mural above is one example (and a fine one!) of what are only a handful of artful murals on display here. Drink up, and let’s move on before I decide to have another beer.
The City Center – We reenter the Metro and ride to the Estacion Parque Berrio which is one stop beyond Estacion San Antonio, Medellin’s version of Time’s Square. We take a short walk north through crowded commercial streets to Plaza Botero.
Typical Botero buttocks
Before coming to Medellin I didn’t really know much about Fernando Botero. I had seen some of his paintings in books but I was unaware that he was also a sculptor. Here in Medellin he is a bit of a local hero. The city has built a huge plaza, “Plaza Botero” to display his work. The plaza was designed to be large enough to give these massive sculptures enough space so they can be appreciated individually.
His work, both paintings and sculptures are easy to recognize. Everything, his people, his animals, even mundane objects like dishes are always round, solid, and larger than life.
I decided to shoot these in black and white in order to emphasize the solidity and mass of these supersized totems. I’m thinking that Botero’s art must have provided him with a lot of financial success since just buying the metal he used to construct these must have cost him a small fortune.
Although we don”t intend to investigate the many fine examples of curated art inside Medellin’s museums today, let’s step off the street just for a moment to enter the Museo de Antioquia next to Botero’s plaza where scores of his paintings hang in its galleries. I buy my first souvenir of Columbia here: a coffee cup with this Botero woman’s face on the sides.
Besides the Boteros, the museum also offers a fine collection of modern art as well as rooms full of nineteenth century portraits of various local movers and shakers, (which I find rather boring, though I know museums have to stroke the egos of local elites to acquire the funding needed to stay open). Here are two of my favorite installations we find there:
The black and white installation is so simple and obvious that I wonder , “Why didn’t I think of that?”. Of course that’s the genius of the piece. It offers up something obvious that we can not see for ourselves until the artist sets it down directly in front of us.
Sigh. Let’s get back out on the street, we have some walking to do.
Plaza Mayor – We walk back under the Metro past San Antonio, across overhead walkways and around heavy traffic to the Plaza Mayor. A multi acre plaza surrounded by megalithic government office buildings that appear to have been built as some sort of urban renewal project. Very few people walk the plaza, and most of the buildings appear to be vacant. The plaza does contain what is billed as a Japanese garden and a water wall installation but both are so unimaginative and sad that we quickly turn away. We continue walking and walking, (I predict by the end of the day your sports watch will log more than 28000 steps) until we come to the base of a hill that harbors more trees than we’ve seen in a while. We begin to climb, and after 20 minutes we arrive at the top of a hill called Cerra Nutibarra where we find….a fake rural Colombian village, Pueblito Paisa. Yes, it is god awful touristy, but I’m a sucker for staged historical sites, and I believe the whole little village qualifies as a form of street art. Somebody worked hard to produce some sort of effect here, and it is outdoors.
It’s a stretch, but let’s consider this to be street art too since it’s on the street and someone spent a lot of time and effort decorating it.
We wander around the tiny plaza, enter a church that can only hold about a dozen people, and watch tourists eating lunch through the windows of a relatively large cantina, (its about four times larger than the church).
I can tell you’re getting a little tired of this gaudy tourist trap, so I take a picture of the inside of the hacienda’s kitchen and we move back down the hill. We retrace our steps to the San Antonio Metro stop, and head for the San Javier station in the western end of the city.
Communa 13 – We walk behind the station and begin winding our way up streets that were originally laid out by the city. We find a few murals here, but for the most part, this section of Communa 13 looks like any other Medellin blue collar neighborhood.
Mural Found in the Lower Part of Communa 13
We continue to climb until we arrive at a series of escalators that will take us up to the illegally constructed part of the Communa. It was built when people arrived on this hillside overlooking the city and started putting up shelters using whatever materials they could find. This created a makeshift area with a jumble of lanes that merged and separated, and merged again. Even today, there are no roads large enough for trucks to serve this warren of human activity, and people must haul materials to repair or expand their houses up the mountain in hand carts or over the shoulder. Yet despite all the difficulties of living here, the residents of this barrio have created the most colorful and the greatest variety of street art found anywhere in Medellin. I know it’s been a long day listening to me drone on, so I’m just going show you my favorite Communa 13 murals one after the other and limit my comments to just a few words:
Some are colorful
Some are realistic
Some are a bit mystical.
Some rely on myths.
Some reflect existing residents.
Some proclaim a message.
And some combine all these facets.
I hope you enjoyed today’s travels as much as i did, and now have some idea of the street art on display here in Medellin.
While I am going to maintain my apartment here in Medellin, I expect the next blogs that I will post after the holidays will cover side trips into the Colombian countryside. Stay tuned for presentations about coffee, archeology, and magical realism!
A graduate of Hamilton College, SUNY Binghamton, and the American College, I've continued my education as an autodidact and world traveler. I tour the world seeking to understand what I see.
Terrific day. Learned a lot about the area. Love the street art in Communa 13 and the Botero’s. Is the art in Communa 13 commissioned (paid?) or is it graffiti? Thanks Terry.
Money usually changed hands, but under varying circumstances. The better local tag artists were paid to build a new mural off of one of their existing tags or to create a brand new mural. This payment was also made to ensure that locals would not “over tag” murals the community wanted to preserve. In other cases a local youth group made up of both previous taggers and non taggers would be paid to create the murals. These groups were supervised by an adult, who probably had a lot to do with the design and subject matter of the mural. Finally, there were outside artists who were commissioned to create some of the murals. I suspect the first mural posted on the blog fell into that category.
His work, both paintings and sculptures are easy to recognize. Everything, his people, his animals, even mundane objects like dishes are always round, solid, and larger than life.
I decided to shoot these in black and white in order to emphasize the solidity and mass of these supersized totems. I’m thinking that Botero’s art must have provided him with a lot of financial success since just buying the metal he used to construct these must have cost him a small fortune.
Although we don”t intend to investigate the many fine examples of curated art inside Medellin’s museums today, let’s step off the street just for a moment to enter the Museo de Antioquia next to Botero’s plaza where scores of his paintings hang in its galleries. I buy my first souvenir of Columbia here: a coffee cup with this Botero woman’s face on the sides.
Besides the Boteros, the museum also offers a fine collection of modern art as well as rooms full of nineteenth century portraits of various local movers and shakers, (which I find rather boring, though I know museums have to stroke the egos of local elites to acquire the funding needed to stay open). Here are two of my favorite installations we find there:
The black and white installation is so simple and obvious that I wonder , “Why didn’t I think of that?”. Of course that’s the genius of the piece. It offers up something obvious that we can not see for ourselves until the artist sets it down directly in front of us.
Sigh. Let’s get back out on the street, we have some walking to do.
Plaza Mayor – We walk back under the Metro past San Antonio, across overhead walkways and around heavy traffic to the Plaza Mayor. A multi acre plaza surrounded by megalithic government office buildings that appear to have been built as some sort of urban renewal project. Very few people walk the plaza, and most of the buildings appear to be vacant. The plaza does contain what is billed as a Japanese garden and a water wall installation but both are so unimaginative and sad that we quickly turn away. We continue walking and walking, (I predict by the end of the day your sports watch will log more than 28000 steps) until we come to the base of a hill that harbors more trees than we’ve seen in a while. We begin to climb, and after 20 minutes we arrive at the top of a hill called Cerra Nutibarra where we find….a fake rural Colombian village, Pueblito Paisa. Yes, it is god awful touristy, but I’m a sucker for staged historical sites, and I believe the whole little village qualifies as a form of street art. Somebody worked hard to produce some sort of effect here, and it is outdoors.
We wander around the tiny plaza, enter a church that can only hold about a dozen people, and watch tourists eating lunch through the windows of a relatively large cantina, (its about four times larger than the church).
I can tell you’re getting a little tired of this gaudy tourist trap, so I take a picture of the inside of the hacienda’s kitchen and we move back down the hill. We retrace our steps to the San Antonio Metro stop, and head for the San Javier station in the western end of the city.
Communa 13 – We walk behind the station and begin winding our way up streets that were originally laid out by the city. We find a few murals here, but for the most part, this section of Communa 13 looks like any other Medellin blue collar neighborhood.
Some are colorful
Some are realistic
Some are a bit mystical.
Some rely on myths.
Some reflect existing residents.
Some proclaim a message.
And some combine all these facets.
I hope you enjoyed today’s travels as much as i did, and now have some idea of the street art on display here in Medellin.
While I am going to maintain my apartment here in Medellin, I expect the next blogs that I will post after the holidays will cover side trips into the Colombian countryside. Stay tuned for presentations about coffee, archeology, and magical realism! 
His work, both paintings and sculptures are easy to recognize. Everything, his people, his animals, even mundane objects like dishes are always round, solid, and larger than life.
I decided to shoot these in black and white in order to emphasize the solidity and mass of these supersized totems. I’m thinking that Botero’s art must have provided him with a lot of financial success since just buying the metal he used to construct these must have cost him a small fortune.
Although we don”t intend to investigate the many fine examples of curated art inside Medellin’s museums today, let’s step off the street just for a moment to enter the Museo de Antioquia next to Botero’s plaza where scores of his paintings hang in its galleries. I buy my first souvenir of Columbia here: a coffee cup with this Botero woman’s face on the sides.
Besides the Boteros, the museum also offers a fine collection of modern art as well as rooms full of nineteenth century portraits of various local movers and shakers, (which I find rather boring, though I know museums have to stroke the egos of local elites to acquire the funding needed to stay open). Here are two of my favorite installations we find there:
The black and white installation is so simple and obvious that I wonder , “Why didn’t I think of that?”. Of course that’s the genius of the piece. It offers up something obvious that we can not see for ourselves until the artist sets it down directly in front of us.
Sigh. Let’s get back out on the street, we have some walking to do.
Plaza Mayor – We walk back under the Metro past San Antonio, across overhead walkways and around heavy traffic to the Plaza Mayor. A multi acre plaza surrounded by megalithic government office buildings that appear to have been built as some sort of urban renewal project. Very few people walk the plaza, and most of the buildings appear to be vacant. The plaza does contain what is billed as a Japanese garden and a water wall installation but both are so unimaginative and sad that we quickly turn away. We continue walking and walking, (I predict by the end of the day your sports watch will log more than 28000 steps) until we come to the base of a hill that harbors more trees than we’ve seen in a while. We begin to climb, and after 20 minutes we arrive at the top of a hill called Cerra Nutibarra where we find….a fake rural Colombian village, Pueblito Paisa. Yes, it is god awful touristy, but I’m a sucker for staged historical sites, and I believe the whole little village qualifies as a form of street art. Somebody worked hard to produce some sort of effect here, and it is outdoors.
We wander around the tiny plaza, enter a church that can only hold about a dozen people, and watch tourists eating lunch through the windows of a relatively large cantina, (its about four times larger than the church).
I can tell you’re getting a little tired of this gaudy tourist trap, so I take a picture of the inside of the hacienda’s kitchen and we move back down the hill. We retrace our steps to the San Antonio Metro stop, and head for the San Javier station in the western end of the city.
Communa 13 – We walk behind the station and begin winding our way up streets that were originally laid out by the city. We find a few murals here, but for the most part, this section of Communa 13 looks like any other Medellin blue collar neighborhood.
Some are colorful
Some are realistic
Some are a bit mystical.
Some rely on myths.
Some reflect existing residents.
Some proclaim a message.
And some combine all these facets.
I hope you enjoyed today’s travels as much as i did, and now have some idea of the street art on display here in Medellin.
While I am going to maintain my apartment here in Medellin, I expect the next blogs that I will post after the holidays will cover side trips into the Colombian countryside. Stay tuned for presentations about coffee, archeology, and magical realism! 
Terrific day. Learned a lot about the area. Love the street art in Communa 13 and the Botero’s. Is the art in Communa 13 commissioned (paid?) or is it graffiti? Thanks Terry.
Money usually changed hands, but under varying circumstances. The better local tag artists were paid to build a new mural off of one of their existing tags or to create a brand new mural. This payment was also made to ensure that locals would not “over tag” murals the community wanted to preserve. In other cases a local youth group made up of both previous taggers and non taggers would be paid to create the murals. These groups were supervised by an adult, who probably had a lot to do with the design and subject matter of the mural. Finally, there were outside artists who were commissioned to create some of the murals. I suspect the first mural posted on the blog fell into that category.