Travel Guides

Santa Fe de Antioquia is the closest real day trip to Medellín, and the one most visitors get wrong. It is an hour and a quarter away through a 4.6-kilometre tunnel by the Gobernación’s own figure, it was the capital of Antioquia until 1826, and its entire historic centre is governed by a legal document…

Jardín is the town people mean when they say they wish they had left Medellín sooner. It is a coffee town in the southwest of Antioquia with a painted plaza, a farmer-built cable car that still carries coffee up the hill, and a bird that lands in a canyon four hundred metres from the main…

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…

Medellín has the lowest homicide rate of any city in Colombia, and the risk to a foreign visitor went up sharply this year. Both of those things are true, and almost every page you will read about this city picks one and ignores the other. The plain answer is that the danger here is not…

Medellín is a city in a narrow valley, and that single fact decides more about your visit than any list of attractions. Things that look adjacent on a map are forty minutes apart at the wrong hour. The cable cars that everyone photographs are public transport with published timetables, and two of the best ones…

Barú is a peninsula, not a beach. Most people arrive believing it is one white crescent an hour from Cartagena, book the version of it they saw in a photograph, and never find out that the same strip of land holds a boat-party lagoon with a legal noise limit, a string of private beach clubs,…

Playa Blanca is the beach in the photographs, and almost everything that goes wrong there comes from one fact nobody tells you: it is not just a beach. It sits inside the boundary of a national park, and that single fact explains the food rule, the plastic ban, the insurance you now need, the vendors,…

Cartagena sells more tours than any other city in Colombia, and the difference between a good day and a wasted one is rarely the price. It is whether the tour matches the day you have, whether you were told what you still have to pay after the ticket, and whether the person taking your money…

The Rosario Islands are not a resort strip an hour from Cartagena. They are the core of a national park that holds most of Colombia’s continental-shelf coral, and since March 2026 you cannot legally enter without an insurance policy that almost no tour listing mentions. This page is about what the islands are, the three…

Cartagena has one problem with beaches and it is not the beaches. It is that the city sits on grey sand and the white sand is an hour away, so almost every visitor books the wrong one for the day they have. This page sorts the coast by how far you have to go and…

The plain answer is that Cartagena is safer than the country’s reputation and less safe than its postcards, and that almost none of the violence you have read about is aimed at you. In the first half of 2026 the city recorded 153 homicides and received about 3.3 million visitors. Of the 27 homicides in…

Almost every list of things to do in Cartagena is ordered by how good each thing is, which is the least useful way to order it. What decides your week here is where things are: what you can walk to inside the walls, what is a ten-minute drive, what needs a boat, and what is…