Eleven days in Colombia: Medellin, Guatape and the Caribbean coast

What to take away

• Fly. Medellin to the coast is an hour in the air and fifteen hours on the road.
• Comuna 13 with a guide who lives there. The history is the tour, not the escalators.
• Tayrona closes for several weeks a year. Check the dates before you book flights.
• Cartagena is unwalkable from noon to four. Plan around the heat, not through it.
• Guatape is a day trip from Medellin. Staying there costs you an evening in the city.

Medellin is a valley with a metro, and that explains it

Medellin sits in a narrow valley at 1,500 metres, which gives it the climate that earned it the nickname city of eternal spring, roughly 22 to 28 degrees all year. The city that spreads up the valley walls was, for decades, cut off from the one on the floor of it.

The metro and the cable cars that plug into it changed that, and they are the reason to spend a day riding public transport here. The Metrocable to Santo Domingo and on to Parque Arvi costs a normal fare plus a supplement, takes you over neighbourhoods that were unreachable a generation ago, and ends in a cloud forest above the city.

Stay in Laureles rather than El Poblado if you want the city rather than the expat version of it. Poblado is safe, comfortable and increasingly a strip of the same bars found in every digital-nomad district on earth. Laureles is where people live, is ten minutes away, and costs less.

• Metrocable to Arvi: an hour each way, and the best three euros in the city.
• Comuna 13 with a neighbourhood guide, in the morning.
• Laureles for a base, Poblado for one night out if you want it.
• Museo de Antioquia for the Botero collection, plus the square outside it.

Comuna 13, and how to visit it well

Comuna 13 was, in the early 2000s, the site of a military operation in a dense hillside neighbourhood, and the events of that period are within living memory of everyone who lives there. It is now on every itinerary, reached by outdoor escalators, covered in murals, and visited by several thousand people a day.

That can go two ways. A guide from outside the neighbourhood delivers a graffiti tour with a soundtrack. A guide who grew up there gives you the actual history, points at the specific stairs where specific things happened, and the money stays in the barrio. The second version is better and costs the same.

Go in the morning. By two in the afternoon the escalators are a queue, the viewpoints are full, and the sound systems are competing. Also: it is a residential neighbourhood. People are going to work up those stairs while you photograph them.

Guatape is a day, and the rock is the smaller half

El Penol, the granite monolith with 740 steps zigzagging up a crack in its face, is the photograph. The climb takes twenty to thirty minutes, costs a small entry fee, and gives you a view over a flooded valley of islands and inlets that is genuinely unlike anywhere else.

The town of Guatape, ten minutes away, is the better half. Every building is painted with zocalos, moulded panels around the base of the wall showing what the household does or did. It is bright to the point of absurdity and it is a real town, not a film set.

This is a day trip. Two hours each way from Medellin by bus from Terminal Norte, or a private car for five people at roughly the same total cost with a much better schedule. Staying overnight in Guatape is pleasant and costs you an evening in a city with far more to do.

The coast: Santa Marta for the park, Cartagena for the city

Santa Marta itself is a scruffy port town and not the reason to go. It is the base for Tayrona, the national park where jungle meets Caribbean beaches, and for Minca, a village in the Sierra Nevada foothills at 600 metres where the temperature drops ten degrees and the coffee farms start.

Tayrona has closure periods, usually a few weeks spread across the year, when the park is handed back to the indigenous communities who own it. These dates are published and they move. Check them before you book flights, not after, because there is no workaround.

Inside the park, the walk from the Zaino entrance to Cabo San Juan takes about two hours in heat and humidity that surprises everyone, over roots and sand. Most beaches have dangerous currents and are marked as such; the swimming ones are La Piscina and Cabo. Do not underestimate the walk back in the afternoon sun, and do not do it in flip-flops, whatever anyone in your group claims.

Cartagena, the heat, and what eleven days cost

Cartagena's walled city is one of the best-preserved colonial centres in the Americas and it is at sea level on the Caribbean coast, which means from about eleven to four it is punishing. Plan mornings and evenings, and put the middle of the day in a hammock, a museum or a pool.

Getsemani, just outside the walls, is where we spent most evenings: street art, plaza life around Trinidad church, and the sense of a neighbourhood rather than a set. The walled city at seven in the evening, when the stone has stopped radiating heat, is a different and much better place than at noon.

Costs: internal flights were 40 to 80 euros a head booked six weeks out. A good dinner 60,000 to 90,000 pesos. Tayrona entry was around 70,000 for foreigners. A Rosario Islands day around 150,000 including the boat. Total for eleven days excluding international flights came to roughly 900 euros a head, and the flights and the Rosario day were half of it.

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