Guatapé

Where it sits. Guatapé is a small town of around 6,000 people on the shore of the Peñol-Guatapé reservoir in eastern Antioquia, two hours by road from Medellín and about 1,900 metres above sea level. It occupies a slope between the water and a ring of hills planted with pine and pasture, with the granite dome of El Peñón standing four kilometres to the west like a marker post. The grid of streets is tight and steep in places, funnelling down to a lakefront malecón where boats leave for trips around the flooded valleys. The climate is mild rather than tropical — days in the low twenties, nights that need a jacket — and the light off the water in the late afternoon is the reason so many photographs of the town look the way they do.

The zócalos. What makes Guatapé unlike any other town in Colombia is a decorative tradition local people call zócalos: painted relief panels running along the lower metre or so of house façades, below the windows. The practice appears to have begun in the 1920s, when residents added moulded plaster friezes to protect the wall base from splash and scuffing, then painted them. Over a century the panels became a public record of who lives behind them — sheep and cattle for a farmer, scissors and thread for a tailor, coffee plants, fish, bicycles, saints, and increasingly abstract geometry. Whole streets are colour-coded, with door frames, window surrounds and eaves in contrasting saturated tones. The best concentration is on the Calle del Recuerdo and around the Plazoleta de los Zócalos, where the steps themselves are tiled in the same manner.

The story behind it. The town was founded in 1811 and lived quietly on farming and fishing until the 1970s, when Empresas Públicas de Medellín dammed the Río Nare for hydroelectric power. The reservoir that resulted drowned some 2,200 hectares of the best farmland in the valley, along with the old town of El Peñol, whose residents were relocated to a new settlement built from scratch; a cross on an island marks the submerged church. Guatapé lost land but gained a shoreline, and over the following decades it converted from agriculture to weekend tourism from Medellín. The Iglesia de Nuestra Señora del Carmen on the main plaza, with its tall cream tower, dates from the early twentieth century and anchors the town's older core.

On screen and the Escobar question. Guatapé's most-visited boat trip goes to the ruins of La Manuela, the lakeside estate built by Pablo Escobar, wrecked by a bomb attributed to the rival group Los Pepes in 1993 and left as a shell of scorched concrete and empty pools. Since the success of Narcos, that wreck has become the anchor of a small local industry of "Escobar tours" — though the series itself was shot elsewhere in Colombia, largely in and around Bogotá, and never filmed at this house. It is worth going in clear-eyed: many Antioquians regard the trade in Escobar's remains as an insult to a region that buried thousands of his victims, and the more thoughtful local operators now frame the visit as a ruin of the narco era rather than a shrine to it.

What you actually see today. The lakefront is lined with restaurants serving trout and bandeja paisa, jet-ski rental stands, and boats ranging from small launches to two-deck party barges. Behind it, the streets of zócalos climb toward the plaza, and a set of stairs leads up to the Piedra del Marino viewpoint over town and water. Local specialities are simple and good: arepas with cheese, chorizo, obleas filled with arequipe, and mazamorra — cracked maize in milk. Weekend nights are loud with vallenato and reggaetón; midweek the town returns to itself. Kayaks, paddleboards and horseback rides fill out the afternoons, and the road out toward El Peñón passes several viewpoints worth stopping at.

Getting there and timing. Buses run from Medellín's Terminal del Norte roughly hourly and take about two hours, passing through El Peñol; drivers can combine the town with the rock in one day but will find both crowded. December to March and July to August are the driest periods, though rain at any time is common and passes quickly. The main plaza and lakefront are flat and manageable, but side streets are steep and cobbled and kerbs are high. Two nights allow a morning climb of El Peñón, a lake trip and enough unhurried time to actually look at the zócalos, which is the point of coming.