Medellin - the Pride of the Paisas

February 18, 2018

Medellin - the Pride of the Paisas

Last day in Medellin and it’s been good.

A striking feature of this place is the obvious pride the Paisas - inhabitants of Medellin and surroundings - have in their main city. I can understand that - especially for people old enough to remember what it was like in the 80’s and 90’s. To see the city improving day by day, becoming safer, tourists arriving to visit (a very new phenomenon here)... It must feel like a kind of miracle - each day of peace and each improvement a gift to be cherished.

One of the biggest sources of pride locally is the metro system. This, the only metro in Colombia, was build in the eighties. This was the heart of the bad times, when around 7500 people were killed in Medellin annually. Think about that figure for a while. And Medellin was also struggling financially, since the biggest business in town wasn’t creating any tax revenues. And nobody in Colombia had any idea how to build a metro, as this was the first (and to date, only) one. And yet the metro got built and is the vital lifeline of commuting in this city! One evening there was some major electrical disturbance in the metro and the metros didn’t run all evening. The lady at my hostel said the worst fault in 20 years - they are not common. When it normally took her 35 minutes to get home, that night it took her four hours!

The Paisas are justly proud of their metro. It’s a symbol of hope and achievement for them and this is clearly reflected in the state of the metro cars and stations: Immaculate! Not a single tag or graffiti or bit of litter anywhere, though elsewhere in the city they proliferate. Not a single coin scratched window. No-one eating or drinkin on the metro.

And Medellin’s cable car - the metrocable - has become a symbol for the renaissance of the city. It’s the first cable car in the world built primarily as public transport and has inspired other cities in South America (such as La Paz) to install similar cable car systems to connect the poorest neighbourhoods with the downtown area. And indeed the poorest neighbourhoods are nearly alwyays the ones highest up the hill in cities in mountanous regions. People appreciate flat ground, when there’s little of it to go round.

Here, as in La Paz, the lights that twinkle high above at night are not all stars.

One of the cable cars actually goes to the toop of the mountain and beyond - ending at parque Arvi, a great area of foggy jungle.

Aparently Colombia has four kinds of jungle: the Amazon, the rainy jungle (around Tayrona, Palomino and Minca), the stony jungle (close to the Venezuelan border) and this, the foggy jungle, which grows in the mountains in this region and provides Medellin and environs with good, clean water.

Tap water here is potable. To protect these water sources, the woods in the mountains around Medellin are protected. And extremely pretty to boot!

Pretty, too, was the village of Guatape, some 90km from Medellin, where I went for a day trip yesterday. The main attraction is the Rock of Peñol, a weird chunk of stone some 200 meters high with enough stairs to keep you huffing and puffing.

Admittedly the rock looks very out of place. Below is one theory of how it got here: it’s an ALIEN SHIP!

The view from on top of the rock is a view of a large lake with many bays, islands and peninsulas.

But there’s something a bit off about the lake - as it turns out this is all artificial - a water reserve for a hydro electricity plant.

But my, oh my, they really went to some trouble to make it pretty! I think someone had an aerial view of the Finnish lake district as the blueprint for the project, since there was something awfully familiar about the view.