The City of Eternal Spring — transformed from the world's most dangerous city to one of its most innovative
Medellín sits in a mountain valley at 1,495 meters, earning its nickname 'City of Eternal Spring' — the temperature rarely strays from 22–28°C year-round. The city's transformation from the world's most dangerous city (1991 murder rate: 381 per 100,000 people — 16x higher than it is today) to a celebrated example of urban innovation is one of the most striking civic turnarounds of the 21st century: cable cars and outdoor escalators connecting the steep hillside comunas to the city center, public libraries in the poorest neighborhoods, the world-class Parque Explora science museum. Food in Med…
Medellín was founded in 1616 as a colonial settlement in the Andes; for most of its history it was a quiet textile and industrial city, becoming Colombia's second city through a 20th-century industrial boom. The cocaine trade began in the late 1970s; Pablo Escobar, born in the Medellín suburb of Envigado in 1949, built the Medellín Cartel into the world's most powerful criminal organization by the mid-1980s — at its peak, it supplied 80% of the world's cocaine and generated estimated revenues of $420m per week. Escobar's campaign of terror against the Colombian state (assassinating presidenti…