Medellin Audio Tours

Medellin was officially founded in 1675, but the version of the city that most people know -- or fear -- dates to the 1980s, when Pablo Escobar's cartel made it the most dangerous city on earth. At its worst, the homicide rate reached around 380 per 100,000 people. Escobar was killed in December 1993, and what followed is one of the more dramatic urban transformations of the 20th century: by 2013, the Urban Land Institute had named Medellin the world's most innovative city, ahead of Singapore and New York.

The tool of transformation was infrastructure pushed into the places that had been most abandoned.

The MetroCable opened aerial gondola lines in 2004 connecting the steep hillside comunas -- particularly the western slopes of the Aburra Valley -- to the metro network below. In 2011, a 384-meter public escalator opened in Comuna 13, which had been the site of military operations against guerrillas as recently as 2002. The outdoor escalator now rises through a neighborhood painted with murals, connected to the rest of the city in a way that had not been possible before. The library parks program -- public buildings in the comunas serving as community centers as well as book collections -- was later exported as a model to Rio de Janeiro.