A university as a park and a cinema in a mall

After the dentist I had a free afternoon and went to look at the university I had only ever driven past. I stayed three hours.

A university that is a park

It is called EAFIT, it stands on Carrera 49 in the La Aguacatala neighbourhood, and nobody stopped me at the entrance.

The campus is open and is one large park: paved paths between trees, grass, benches, sheets of water along brick walls, birds. Students sit on the grass, on steps, on low walls. Mango trees heavy with fruit grow between the buildings.

It looks like a campus somewhere in California, and it is in the middle of Medellín, two hundred metres from a six lane avenue.

Where it came from

EAFIT was founded in 1960 by a group of nineteen businessmen as a school of administration and finance. It exists precisely because Medellín was growing fast on industry at the time and did not have enough people who could run those factories.

The school moved to its present campus in La Aguacatala in 1963. Since 2004 it has developed under a plan called universidad parque, the university as a park: almost thirty thousand square metres of green space, with trees chosen deliberately to bring birds in.

The Luis Echavarría Villegas library, a brick building with water running along its wall, opened in 1999, and the whole campus is arranged around it.

Three things that struck me

It is open. No fence with barbed wire, no reception handing out passes. You walk in and you are inside.

It is quiet. In the middle of the city, two hundred metres from a main avenue, I could hear birds.

There is somewhere to sit. Cafés, canteens, stalls, tables in the shade. If this were in Prague, half the city would be sitting there.

Evening: a cinema in a shopping centre

From the university it is a walk to the Oviedo shopping centre, which is a thing in itself.

It opened in November 1979 with ninety seven shops, was only the third mall in Medellín, and was the first in Colombia to have its own cinema. Today it is the oldest mall in El Poblado and stands on what is called the Golden Mile.

It is not a box. It is open at the sides, palms grow between the floors, people sit around the trees, and in the evening they come to sit rather than to shop.

I went to see Spider-Man. In the original, with Spanish subtitles, which is normal here for big films: dubbing is kept for children's showings, the rest runs in the original. The ticket cost less than a coffee in Prague.

I came out at ten at night, past palms, neon and people on the steps. A cinema in the tropics has something to it.