What to sort out after arriving, and in what order?

Most guides about moving explain how things get done. This one is about the order, because that is where people lose weeks here. Half the offices want a document you can only get at another office, which wants a third one first.

This is the order that works. It is written for someone who came to stay, not for a holiday.

Day zero: before you fly

These are much harder to arrange from Colombia than from home:

• Health insurance for the whole stay. It is mandatory for a visa application and cannot be bought retroactively.
• Move bank verification codes to an app and keep your old phone number alive. This is the single most common snag of the whole move.
• Yellow fever vaccination, at least ten days before departure. In 2026 the certificate is asked for on entry.
• Money for the first month without a local account. You will not have an account straight away, and a deposit is due before everything else.
• Scans of passport, visa and photos in the cloud. Every second office and every landlord will ask for a copy.

Week one: exist

1. The stamp in your passport and the date on it. Check how many days you were given. It is not always ninety and it counts in days, not months.

2. A SIM card. Bought against your passport and registered on the spot. Without a local number you cannot open a ride hailing account, cannot pay by Bre-B, and the bank will not deal with you. A monthly package runs about twenty thousand pesos.

3. A Cívica card for the metro. Sold at every station, it makes each ride cheaper and it also pays for the airport bus.

4. Cash and first purchases. Colombia runs on cards and cash at the same time. You will not get through the first days without a few hundred thousand pesos in your pocket.

5. Short-term housing, not a long lease. Take a month in a furnished flat and choose the neighbourhood only after you have seen it in the morning, at midday and on a Sunday evening. Sign for a year off photos and you will pay dearly to change it.

Do nothing in the first month that is hard to undo: a long lease, an annual subscription, a car. The first month is for finding out what you actually need.

Week two: understand the city

Walk three or four neighbourhoods, do not drive them. On foot you notice the slope of the streets, the noise, the shade and whether there is anywhere to buy food. Slope matters far more in Medellín than a map suggests.

Find your nearest hospital and pharmacy. It takes ten minutes and one day it will save you half an hour of panic.

Learn how to pay water, gas and electricity. Bills arrive on paper and are paid in a shop or in your banking app, not by transfer the way you are used to.

Get used to estrato. A number from one to six attached to every address decides what you pay for utilities and rubbish collection. As a tenant you cannot change it, but you should know what it means.

Weeks three and four: put down roots

Visa and cédula. Once you have the visa, you register with Migración Colombia and get the cédula de extranjería, the local ID. Without it there is no bank account and no health insurance, so it is the knot everything else hangs on.

A bank account. It wants the cédula and proof of address. With the account comes Bre-B, the QR payments absolutely everyone here uses.

Health insurance. With a visa and a cédula you join an EPS. Anyone who wants a specialist quickly buys private top-up cover on top.

A long-term lease. Only now, once you know where you want to live and have the documents. Expect a deposit and expect to be asked for a guarantor or rent insurance.

One social thing a week. A Spanish class, a language exchange, a running group, anything. It is the only item on this list nobody ticks off in time, and the one that decides most whether you last here.

What can wait, and nobody tells you

• A car. In Medellín it is mostly a nuisance, and buses cover the rest of the country.
• Furniture. Furnished flats are normal here and cheap.
• Permanent residency. That is a matter of years, not months.
• Shipping your things. Most of what you would send costs less to buy here than to transport.

Budget for the first month

Without numbers this reads like advice from nowhere, so a rough shape for one person arriving and setting up:

• short-term housing for a month, more expensive than a long lease, count on double
• deposit and first rent at once, the moment you sign
• phone, transport, food, the ordinary running costs
• a reserve for paperwork: fees, copies, a notary, a translator, photos

Concrete amounts live in the guide about costs and in the price log, where they are kept with a date and a place. The rule here is simpler: the first month costs twice what the following ones do.

The most common first-month mistakes

1. A long lease signed in week one. You learn a neighbourhood by living in it for a few days.
2. Putting off the SIM card. Without a number everything else jams.
3. Relying on English. It lasts three days, then it starts getting in the way.
4. Not reading the day count on the stamp. Overstaying means a fine and paperwork.
5. Living only among foreigners. The fastest route to leaving after a year with the same Spanish and not one local friend.