Neighbourhood · Medellín · Colombia
Comuna 8, Villa Hermosa
A rail down the middle of the street at San José. A single guide rail, and rubber tyres for the rest.
The eastern slope above the centre. Comuna 8 is called Villa Hermosa, and it takes in a band of neighbourhoods that runs from the edge of the centre right up to the contour line where the forest starts.
You get here by tram along Ayacucho and then by cable car. From up there you see the whole valley, and directly below you corrugated roofs, unrendered brick, stairs instead of streets, and vegetable patches wedged between the houses.
Visitors do not come here on their own, and that is the best thing about it. The people in the stations are locals with shopping bags, not with cameras.
A bit of history
The slopes above the centre were built from the bottom up and mostly without a plan. They grew out of people who came to Medellín for work or fled violence in the countryside and built a house out of whatever was to hand. The city's own figures still show it: comuna 8 is one of the youngest and poorest parts of Medellín.
Change arrived with transport. First the Ayacucho tram, opened in October 2015, the only rubber tyred tram in Colombia, Translohr technology running on a single guide rail in the middle of the track. Trams ran along Ayacucho from 1921 until 1951, so after sixty five years they came back.
Two cable car lines feed off the tram. Line H from Oriente to Villa Sierra opened in December 2016 and has three stations; line M from Miraflores to Trece de Noviembre was added in February 2019.
It is a continuation of what Medellín calls social urbanism: put transport, a library and a park into the least accessible neighbourhood and see what happens. A journey that took an hour and a half uphill on foot now takes twenty minutes. That is the whole trick.
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