Comuna 13 (San Javier)

Where it sits. Comuna 13 — officially San Javier — is a hillside district on the western edge of Medellín, a stack of self-built brick houses climbing the slope of the Aburrá valley from roughly 1,500 to 1,800 metres. It contains around twenty barrios, among them Las Independencias, El Salado, Veinte de Julio and Nuevas Brisas, and holds well over 100,000 people. Its geography is the key to its history: the district sits astride the corridor where the San Juan highway leaves the city westward toward the Urabá coast, a route that mattered enormously to anyone moving weapons or cocaine. The lanes are too steep and narrow for cars in most places, so movement is on foot, up long flights of concrete stairs between houses that rise three and four storeys with rebar still poking from their roofs.

The story behind it. The comuna was built by people arriving with nothing — rural families displaced by Colombia's violence from the 1950s onward, who occupied the slope and constructed their own houses, water lines and staircases with little help from the city. By the 1990s the area was contested by leftist militias, then by paramilitary blocs, then by the criminal combos that succeeded them. In 2002 the state moved in force: Operación Mariscal in May, and on 16–17 October Operación Orión, a joint military and police assault involving helicopters and around a thousand troops, fought street by street while residents hung white sheets from their windows. Civilians were killed and disappeared; the search of La Escombrera, a construction landfill above the barrios where victims are believed to have been buried, is still going on decades later.

What changed. The turn came through infrastructure. The Metrocable line to San Javier opened in 2008, hitching the hillside to the city's metro, and in December 2011 the city inaugurated a set of six outdoor escalators — 384 metres of them under bright orange canopies — replacing a climb of several hundred steps that had taken residents half an hour with a ride of about six minutes. The escalators were a statement as much as a machine: public money spent visibly, on the poorest slope in the city. Around them grew a culture of hip-hop and mural painting led by local collectives, notably Casa Kolacho, named for a murdered rapper; their graffitour, running since the early 2010s, is now the main way outsiders see the neighbourhood.

On screen — and what was filmed elsewhere. Comuna 13 is one of the most photographed urban landscapes in Latin America, but it is not where the shows people associate with Medellín were made. Netflix's Narcos did film in Colombia, yet its 1980s Medellín was largely reconstructed in Bogotá, whose colonial quarter of La Candelaria was chosen because it still looked like the period; even the kidnapping of Martha Nieves Ochoa, which really happened on a Medellín university campus, was staged in Bogotá. What Comuna 13 does host is a constant stream of documentary crews, music videos, reggaetón shoots and travel programming, plus the phone cameras of several thousand daily visitors. The murals are the subject, and they change: many are repainted annually, so the wall you saw in a video two years ago may no longer exist.

What you actually see today. From the San Javier metro station a bus or tuk-tuk climbs to the base of the escalators, where the tour route begins. It runs past murals narrating Orión — elephants for memory, eyes and white handkerchiefs — through terraces of shops selling mango biche, popsicles and spray-paint art, past breakdancers and rappers performing for tips, and out onto viewpoints over the whole western valley. It is unambiguously a tourist economy now, and residents are divided about it: it brought income to families that had none, and it also brought noise, rising rents and pressure on housing. Going with a guide from the barrio, rather than an operator based downtown, keeps more of the money on the hill.

Getting there and timing. Take Metro line B to San Javier — about twenty minutes from the centre — then the connecting bus or a tuk-tuk to Las Independencias. Mornings, especially midweek, are calmer, cooler and better for photographs; weekend afternoons are packed. The escalators themselves are covered and step-free, but the surrounding streets are steep, with stairs everywhere, so mobility is genuinely limited. Standard urban caution applies, particularly after dark and away from the main route. Medellín's climate holds around 22–28°C year-round, with the heaviest rain in April–May and September–November.