Comuna 13, Medellín: What It Is, What Happened, and How to Visit It Well

Comuna 13 is the most visited place in Medellín and the most poorly explained. It is a steep hillside neighbourhood of about 130,000 people, it has a set of outdoor public escalators that changed how residents get home, and it has walls covered in paint that is not decoration. Above it, on the hill you can see from the top of the escalators, a government forensic team is still digging for the bodies of people who disappeared here. That is the part almost no page tells you, and it is the reason the murals exist.

Written in September 2026 by the Safe Transfers Colombia team, who drive people to this neighbourhood every week. The 2002 figures are the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica’s. The disappearance and excavation figures are from the Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas and the Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz. The escalator and visitor-management figures are the Alcaldía de Medellín’s, with press figures marked as press. Where we are giving you our judgement rather than a source, we say so.

What Comuna 13 actually is

Its real name is San Javier. It is comuna 13 of Medellín, one of sixteen, on the western wall of the Aburrá valley, and it is home to roughly 130,000 people across around twenty barrios. The part visitors see — Las Independencias, the escalators, the painted walls — is one section of one barrio.

Three things about the geography explain everything else:

• It is very steep. The hillside rises sharply from the valley floor, and before 2011 getting home from the metro meant climbing several hundred irregular concrete steps with your shopping.
• It sits on the road out of the city to the west. That is the San Juan corridor towards Urabá and the Pacific, which is exactly why armed groups fought over it in the 1990s and 2000s. This neighbourhood was strategic terrain, not a random place where bad things happened.
• It was cut off. The state arrived late, in force, and then again slowly with infrastructure. The escalators and the cable car are the second kind of arrival.

Everything you will be shown on a tour is downstream of those three facts.

What happened here, with the official numbers

Through 2002 the Colombian state ran a series of armed operations in Comuna 13 against guerrilla militias that controlled parts of it. The largest was Operación Orión, and the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica calls it the urban armed intervention of greatest impact in the entire Colombian conflict.

Read that civilian row carefully, because it is where the argument lives. Those are the figures recorded for the operation itself. They are not the number of people this neighbourhood lost.

We are not going to adjudicate that gap for you. What we will say is that when a guide from the neighbourhood tells you a number that does not match a government press release, they are usually talking about the second set of figures, not the first, and both are on the record.

The hill above it, and why this is not history yet

La Escombrera is a construction landfill on the ridge above Comuna 13. For twenty years, families here have said that people taken during and around the 2002 operations were buried in it, under the debris of a growing city. For most of those twenty years they were not believed.

They are being believed now, and here is where that stands.

• Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas, the state body created to search for the missing, has been working La Escombrera since 2020, under protective measures ordered by the JEP in Auto AI-010 of 20 August 2020 covering La Escombrera and La Arenera.
• The current forensic phase began around July 2024.
• By January 2025, four bodies had been recovered, after moving 37,077 cubic metres of earth and debris — about 2,059 truckloads — towards a target of over 41,000 cubic metres, the level the ground sat at in 2003 and 2004.
• By an August 2026 JEP hearing, seven people had been recovered, identified and returned to their families, with more than 48,000 cubic metres moved and phase five of the excavation at 97 percent. Phase six, involving slope stabilisation and drainage, is expected to take a further 16 to 20 months.

The escalators, which are not an attraction

Everyone comes for the escaleras eléctricas, and they are the thing most often described wrongly. They are municipal transport infrastructure. They are free. Residents use them to get home with the shopping.

The practical consequence of that last row: check before you go, and be ready to walk a section. It does not ruin the visit, but it does change how much climbing you do.

Getting there, and when

The official city tourism guide is straightforward about this, and so are we.

• Metro Line B to San Javier, the western terminus of the line. That is how residents do it and it is the cheapest way in — the standard fare is $3.820 COP on a Cívica card. Remember that the ticket office takes cash only.
• From San Javier, it is a short ride or walk uphill to the escalators. Local transport runs the route; a guide meeting you at the station will handle it.
• Metrocable Line J also leaves from San Javier and gives you a panoramic view over the comuna. It is on the ordinary fare, unlike the Arví cable. Worth doing either before or after, not instead.
• By car, it is roughly twenty minutes from El Poblado outside rush hour and closer to forty-five in it. A driver can put you at the top and collect you at the bottom, which removes the climb entirely — that is what we do for passengers who cannot manage stairs, and our Medellín page lists the rest of what we run here.

On safety, since it is the question we get most: Comuna 13 does not appear anywhere in the District’s ranking of comunas by drugging robbery — the two at the top of that list are El Poblado and Laureles, where visitors sleep. Is Medellín safe goes through the actual figures. Ordinary care with your phone in a crowd applies here as it does anywhere.

Choosing a guide, and why it is not optional

You can walk Comuna 13 with a map and see nothing. The walls are a record of specific events and specific people, and the difference between a good visit and a bad one is entirely who is walking with you.

Medellín’s own tourism guide puts it plainly: local guides know the area’s history best, having watched the transformation first-hand. Our version of the same advice, with the practical test attached:

• Ask where the guide is from before you book. Not which agency — where they live. Someone from the comuna will tell you which of the events on the walls happened to their family.
• Expect to hear disagreement. Guides here do not agree with each other about 2002, about the paramilitaries, or about tourism. That is a sign of an honest tour, not a badly organised one.
• Book close to the source. Around 600 guides depend on this trade, and a community body, Corporación Somos la 13, represents more than a thousand businesses and over three hundred guides. The further up a resale chain you book, the less of your money lands here — the same argument we make about booking direct rather than through a marketplace.
• If you need it in English, arrange it in advance rather than hoping at the station. Our English-speaking drivers handle the pairing.

What it has become, honestly

This is the part a tourism page will not tell you, and it is the reason some people come away flat.

The graffiti that made Comuna 13 famous is being covered over by the commerce the graffiti attracted. El Colombiano reported in July 2026 that 61 of the 69 murals on the tour route were fully or partly obscured by stalls, signage and shopfronts. The neighbourhood is now carrying a visitor load nobody designed it for, and the community is trying to organise it rather than let it run.

Medellín has taken that seriously enough to run the first tourist carrying-capacity study in Colombia, in this comuna, to work out how many people the place can actually absorb. Whatever it concludes, the direction is clear: Comuna 13 is being managed now, not discovered.

Our honest read, and this is judgement rather than a source: the tour is still worth doing, and it is no longer the thing people were describing five years ago. What you get today is a busy, commercial, genuinely alive neighbourhood that is telling its own story and selling you a mango on the way past. That is not a betrayal of anything. It is what happens when a place that was starved of money finds some. Go early, book locally, spend money there, and do not expect to be the only foreigner on the stairs.

Practical, in one place

• How long: half a day. The tour itself runs two to three hours; add travel and lunch. Do not stack it against a flight — our Medellín airport guide explains why the airport needs its own morning.
• What to wear: shoes you can climb in. Even with the escalators there is walking, and sections may be closed for the 2026 works.
• Weather: it is exposed. Sun in the morning, rain most afternoons in the wetter months. Take both.
• Cash: bring some. The stalls, the ice cream, the artists selling prints, and the metro ticket office are all cash.
• Photographs: the walls, freely. People, ask first. This is somebody’s street.
• Children: fine, and they will like the escalators. Colombian law requires car seats for small children in a vehicle, which we cover here.
• Accessibility: the escalators help but do not solve it. There are still steps and steep slopes. A car to the top and a pick-up at the bottom is the workable version.
• What not to do: do not treat the history as an anecdote to photograph yourself in front of, and do not buy anything Escobar-branded. This is the neighbourhood that paid for that story.

If you are building the rest of the day around it, things to do in Medellín sets out what pairs well with a Comuna 13 morning and what does not, including the fact that the Metrocable lines do not start until 8:30 or 9:00 on Sundays and holidays.

Questions travellers ask

Is Comuna 13 safe to visit?

Yes, in daylight, on the tour route, with ordinary care about your phone in a crowd. It does not appear in the District’s ranking of Medellín comunas by drugging robbery — the two at the top are El Poblado and Laureles, where most visitors stay. The neighbourhood carries roughly two million visitors a year.

Do you need a guide for Comuna 13?

Practically, yes. You can walk it alone safely enough, but the walls are a record of specific events and without someone who lived them the tour is a walk past paint. Medellín’s official tourism guide gives the same advice. Ask where the guide is from, not which agency they work for.

How do you get to Comuna 13 from El Poblado?

Metro Line B to San Javier, its western terminus, then a short ride or walk up to the escalators at the Las Independencias viewpoint. The standard metro fare is $3.820 COP on a Cívica card, and the ticket office takes cash only. By car it is about twenty minutes outside rush hour and closer to forty-five in it.

What time should you visit Comuna 13?

Before ten in the morning. Average daily footfall runs between five and seven and a half thousand people, and weekend afternoons between three and six reach as many as seventeen thousand. The escalators took 1,981,579 visitors in 2025.

Are the escalators free?

Yes. They are municipal transport infrastructure, not an attraction, and about 25,000 residents a month use them to get home. They opened in December 2011, run in six sections, and replaced a climb of 200 to 380 irregular steps. Since 2024 they have run partly on 56 solar panels covering around 21 percent of the electricity they and the lighting consume.

What happened in Comuna 13 in 2002?

Operación Orión, which the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica describes as the urban armed intervention of greatest impact in the Colombian conflict. It began on 16 October 2002 and ran into early December, with more than 1,500 members of the security forces and judicial bodies, supported by armoured vehicles and gunship helicopters, and with paramilitary participation. The official record for the operation lists one civilian killed, 38 wounded and eight disappeared. Separately, the JEP has documented 459 victims of forced disappearance in this comuna across 1978 to 2016.

What is La Escombrera?

A construction landfill on the ridge above Comuna 13 where families have long said the disappeared were buried. The Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas has been working it since 2020 under JEP protective measures, with the current forensic phase starting around July 2024. As of an August 2026 hearing, seven people had been recovered, identified and returned to their families, with more than 48,000 cubic metres of earth and debris moved.

Is Comuna 13 worth visiting in 2026?

Our judgement: yes, early in the day and with a local guide, provided you know what you are walking into. It is busier and more commercial than the version described a few years ago — 61 of the 69 murals on the route are now fully or partly obscured by stalls and signage — and it is still the clearest account this city gives of what happened to it.

Sources: the dates of Operación Orión from 16 October 2002 into early December, the participation of more than 1,500 members of the security forces and judicial bodies alongside paramilitary groups with armoured vehicles and gunship helicopters, the more than 150 raids, and the recorded toll of one civilian killed, 38 wounded and eight disappeared together with 10 guerrillas, one police officer and two soldiers killed and five police and nine soldiers wounded — Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica. The 459 victims of forced disappearance documented in Comuna 13 between 1978 and 2016, the protective measures of Auto AI-010 of 20 August 2020 covering La Escombrera and La Arenera, the seven people recovered, identified and returned to their families, phase five at 97 percent and phase six expected to take 16 to 20 months, and the more than 48,000 cubic metres moved — Jurisdicción Especial para la Paz, hearing of 5 August 2026, reported by Infobae. The intervention at La Escombrera since 2020, the current forensic phase and the recovery of four bodies by January 2025 after moving 37,077 cubic metres of earth and debris in about 2,059 truckloads towards a target of over 41,000 cubic metres, the 502 people from Comuna 13 on the register of the disappeared against roughly 300 search requests, and the Antioquia figure of 25,728 of Colombia’s 124,734 registered disappearances before December 2016 — Unidad de Búsqueda de Personas dadas por Desaparecidas. The escalators opening in December 2011 in six tramos, replacing a climb of 200 to 380 irregular steps, serving about 25,000 residents a month, and running partly on 56 solar panels supplying around 21 percent of the electricity for the escalators and lighting, avoiding 6.95 tonnes of CO2 a year for an investment of more than 111 million pesos, and the first tourist carrying-capacity study in Colombia carried out in this comuna — Alcaldía de Medellín. San Javier as the western terminus of Metro Line B, Metrocable Line J departing from it, the escalators at the Las Independencias viewpoint, and the recommendation to use local guides — Medellín Travel, the city’s official tourism guide. The metro fare of $3.820 COP on a Cívica card and the cash-only rule at ticket offices — Metro de Medellín. The 2025 total of 1,981,579 visitors, the average daily footfall of 5,000 to 7,500 rising to 17,000 on weekend afternoons, 61 of 69 murals on the route fully or partly obscured, around 600 guides working there and the role of Corporación Somos la 13, and the 2026 renovation replacing 350 steps — El Colombiano, a newspaper rather than a primary source. The comuna ranking for drugging robberies in which Comuna 13 does not appear — Sistema de Información para la Seguridad y la Convivencia of the Alcaldía de Medellín, reported by Infobae. Judgements about when to go, how to choose a guide, and whether the visit is still worth it are the Safe Transfers Colombia team’s own. Figures, works and excavation status change: confirm before you travel.