This weekend I was fortunate to hear about a night hike, from downtown Medellin heading west into the mountains. A new language exchange friend of mine had sent through a screenshot, it was a Facebook event page from Antioquia Al Aire. This is a local outdoor guiding company, and it ended up being a fantastic night, a definite highlight of my time in Medellin so far.
Many thanks to Isabel for background information and patiently translating lots of information from the guides, much of which I’ve used in this post.
Parents watch as their kids play in a truck mounted ball pit
We met in Parque Boston, downtown Medellin. It was a Saturday night, and the park was full of people. Children were doing the various activities available, and there were lots of stalls selling food (I’ll have to go hungry and report back on the cow intestines another time).This goes on every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night.
You can win prizes in the futbol bowling gameA group from southern Colombia perform for the crowdPainting seemed to be a fairly popular optionWe walked from downtown up past some new tramlines, and into a poorer communa on the hillside.It was a ‘luna llena’-full moon, hence the timing for the night hikeCheap but perfectly usable head torches were handed out as a gift to all participants at the start of the night. However with the moon shining brightly, it wasn’t until near the end of the night, as we got into the forest, that we needed the torches.As I was lining up this photo, the fella in the green walked past and suggested I keep my camera well hidden. Our group never had any issues, and one of our three guides said the area is relatively safe these days, but it did have a very violent past. This is immediately next to the communa La Sierra, where in the early 2000s there was urban warfare between rival groups vying for control of the area. It was generally between leftist guerrilla groups and right wing paramilitaries, but of course it was a lot more complicated than that. Check out this documentary if you are interested, but be warned it’s fairly confronting.We left the streets and started climbing stairs through the communa.
A small store at the front of a home. Colombians are generally very entrepreneurial, as regular employment is hard to come by.
There has been a lot of effort put into signage, but some maps like the above were a little confusing
We left the communa and started hiking up a brand new path. Only about 2km have been completed thus far, of a planned 18km. This might sound like slow going, but construction of the track and the park surrounding it required the removal of a shanty town containing over 600 families. These are people who would have fled past violence in country areas, and come looking for work in the city – a common theme worldwide. Given how progressive this city is with social infrastructure, I imagine they would have been re-homed elsewhere
This section of track below us was still under construction.An amazing amount of detail and effort has gone into the track – such as this vertical garden.Clear signage detailing other green areas of MedellinThere were an abundance of colourful sculptures along the track, mostly aimed at kids and with a definite environmentally friendly theme.The statue at the top of the Pan Du Azucar mountainThe view down to Medellin from the top was pretty spectacular
danieltrees.com 