Medellín travel guide

Top 10 sights in Medellín

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   Metropolitan Cathedral of Medellín

   The cathedral of Medellín on Bolívar Park, finished in 1931 after fifty-eight years, and built of about 1.12 million fired bricks — reckoned the largest brick-built cathedral in the world. Its German organ has 3,478 pipes.

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2. 

   2© Steffen Schmitz (more photos) · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Museum of Antioquia

   An art museum of 1881 in the old city hall, the second oldest museum in Colombia, holding the collection Fernando Botero gave his home city — 119 of his own works and 21 by others he owned. Twenty-three of his bronzes stand in the square outside.

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3. 

   3© Andrés Molina Mesa · CC BY 2.0

   Medellín Museum of Modern Art

   The modern art museum of Medellín, founded in 1978 and rehoused in the Talleres Robledo, a 1930s steel works in Ciudad del Río, with a tower added in 2015. Débora Arango, whose paintings scandalised Colombia in the 1940s, is its central holding.

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   4© XalD · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Our Lady of the Rosary Cathedral, Girardota

   A cathedral at Girardota north of Medellín, and the most visited pilgrimage church in Antioquia, holding an image of the Black Christ said to have darkened in a fire. Pilgrims come in their tens of thousands during Holy Week.

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   Parque Explora

   An interactive science museum of 2007, loosely modelled on the Exploratorium in San Francisco, holding the largest freshwater aquarium in South America with about four thousand fish. It stands with the planetarium and the botanic garden in one cultural quarter.

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   6© SajoR · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Spain Library (Medellín)

   A library of 2007 in Santo Domingo Savio, one of the poorest hillside barrios, built as three faceted black rock-like blocks by Giancarlo Mazzanti and reached by the Metrocable. It became the emblem of Medellín's social urbanism, though cladding failures closed it for years.

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7. 

   7© XalD · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Museo El Castillo

   A Gothic-revival mansion of 1930 in El Poblado, built for a coffee family and opened as a museum in 1971. Nine rooms hold porcelain, glass, stained glass and painting, and formal gardens in the French manner drop away below the terrace.

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8. 

   8© Jorge Láscar · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Botanical Garden of Medellín

   A fourteen-hectare botanic garden of 1972 named after the Antioquian naturalist Joaquín Antonio Uribe, holding some 4,500 plants. The Orquideorama of 2006 — ten timber flower-shaped canopies with no walls — hosts the annual orchid show.

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   9

   Arví Park

   A forest park of some 16,000 hectares on the eastern ridge above the Aburrá valley, reached by cable car from Santo Domingo. Pre-Hispanic stone paths built by the Nutabe people still run through the cloud forest, and the reserve supplies part of the city's water.

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    Barefoot Park

    A park of 2000 in the centre, funded by the city utility and designed by Felipe Uribe de Bedout, where visitors are expected to take their shoes off and walk on sand, water and bamboo. It sits directly beside the utility's own tower.

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1. 

   1© Staticshakedown · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Botero Plaza

   A 7,000-square-metre square between the Museum of Antioquia and the Rafael Uribe Uribe Palace of Culture, holding twenty-three bronze sculptures Fernando Botero gave the city. His fat figures at that scale in a public square are the city's best-known image of itself.

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2. 

   2© SajoR · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Monumento a la Raza

   A monument of 1988 in the Alpujarra complex, a bronze tower thirty-eight metres high by Rodrigo Arenas Betancourt, spiralling with figures from the history of the Antioquian people. It took nine years to make and is the largest sculpture in Colombia.

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   3© Jorge Gomez (Kroyf) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Plaza Cisneros

   A square in the centre, a bus terminal until the 1990s and long the roughest ground downtown, converted in 2005 into a field of three hundred illuminated columns up to twenty-four metres high. The Park of Lights turned an avoided place into a used one.

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   4© Tarisito · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Park of Bolívar

   A downtown park of 1892 with an equestrian Bolívar at its centre and the brick cathedral of 1931 closing one side. A crafts market fills it on the first Saturday of each month.

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   5© laloking97 · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Berrío Park

   The plaza at the heart of old Medellin, named for Pedro Justo Berrio, governor of Antioquia in the 1870s. Botero's bronze nude known as La Gorda stands at one side, and Line A of the metro runs past on its viaduct overhead.

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   6© XalD · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Parques del Río Medellín

   A linear park along both banks of the Medellín river begun in 2016, built by covering the urban motorway and putting green space on the lid. It is the largest public works project in the city's recent history and remains only partly built.

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   La Alpujarra Administrative Center

   A complex of government buildings of the 1980s in the centre, officially named after José María Córdova, bringing the Antioquia department and the Medellín municipality together on one site. The Monumento a la Raza stands in its plaza.

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   8© SajoR · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Bethlehem Library

   One of Medellín's ten library parks, built in 2008 in the Belén district to a design by the Japanese architect Hiroshi Naito, of separate pavilions set around water and gardens. The library-park programme was an explicit attempt to put good buildings in poor areas.

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   Planetarium of Medellín

   A planetarium established on 10 October 1984 and named after the Jesuit seismologist Jesús Emilio Ramírez, with one of the larger domes in Colombia. It shares a block with the science park and the botanic garden.

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    San Javier Library

    A library park of 2013 in San Javier, named after a priest killed in 2002, built in a district that was among the most violent in the city during the paramilitary years. The neighbouring Comuna 13 outdoor escalators came from the same programme.

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