Nature · Medellín · Colombia · 2400 m a.s.l.
Parque Arví
You get to the forest from Medellín by metro, and it gets interesting before you even arrive.
The journey is half the trip
North on the metro, change to a cable car, and then change again.
The first cable car climbs over the northern neighbourhoods and there is nowhere to look but down: roofs, stairs, streets on the slope, the whole part of the city that had nowhere else to fit. At the top you change to the second one, and that one does something else entirely. It crosses the ridge and the city is gone. Below the cabin there is nothing but forest.
When you get off it is ten degrees cooler and the air is wet, and you notice both on the first breath. The Medellín valley sits at fifteen hundred metres; up here you are at two and a half thousand.
A walk in the forest
We went for a walk and it was worth it.
It is not the jungle you might picture under the words tropical forest. Much of it was planted and it shows: straight rows, needles underfoot, mist between the trunks. It looks more like a forest in central Europe that had all of this happen to it a good deal higher up and a good deal wetter.
There are over ninety kilometres of trails, so you can take an hour or a whole day.
The waterfalls where the whole city goes
About two kilometres from the station there is a spot with small waterfalls, and that is what people come for.
The water drops over the rocks into a few shallow pools and there is somebody sitting in every one of them. Blankets on the grass around it, food, families, children, a speaker. It is not a hidden tip for foreigners, it is where Medellín comes to sit by the water, and that is the best thing about it.
The water is freezing and you get in anyway.
A bit of history
The forest is older and more inhabited than it looks.
Stone paths run through it that were there long before the Spanish. They were built by the Tahamí, the people who lived in these hills, and they are not just footpaths: terraces, drainage and the remains of settlements are still there too. One of them, the Camino Cieza de León, is said to be more than fifteen hundred years old, and you can still walk it.
The park itself covers sixteen thousand hectares, of which just under two thousand are natural forest. Most of the rest was planted, which is also why the woods up there look so orderly.
What I admire most is how it is tied to the city. The Arví cable car has run since February 2010 and it is part of public transport, not a private attraction above a hotel. With it, Medellín raised its green space per resident from four square metres to twelve. A poor neighbourhood in the north now has a cable car down to work and up into the forest, both on a transit ticket.
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