Tag
18 entries
September
2026
12 entries
10 September · Article
The last digit of your number plate keeps the car off the streets one day a week, from five in the morning to eight in the evening, across the whole valley. Plus the licence that expires after six months, a fine over six hundred thousand pesos, and road death figures that make me uneasy.
10 September · Article · La Candelaria, Medellín
Three hundred thousand people in six communes have had water every other day since late August. The city broke its temperature records in May, Ideam expects a strong El Niño into March, and the grid operator warns that power may not stretch through December. What the rule says, why it landed on the hillsides, and what it means for a trip.
10 September · Article · La Casa del Alimento, Medellín
A Colombian lunch is not one dish, it is a whole set for one price. Two mains, two desserts, two coffees and a lemonade came to 146,000 pesos. And in that restaurant's yard, beef hangs drying.
10 September · Article · Conquistadores, Medellín
A garbage truck with a slogan saying this city is a little silver cup. Who runs it, where the waste goes, why the landfill has eight years left, and how the people who open bags on the street come to be paid out of the water bill.
10 September · Article · Comuna 8, Villa Hermosa, Medellín
A house with almost no windows, hot rice pudding with cheese, and a slope full of lights right up to the ridge. And the only thing that made me uneasy was not what someone who has read about comuna 8 online would expect.
8 September · Article · El Poblado, Medellín
The district where Medellín was founded in 1616 and where almost everybody who flies into the city now sleeps. Provenza with lights in the trees, the singer Karol G's restaurant, a road sign saying tourist zone, and a bill that sums it all up.
8 September · Note · La Candelaria, Medellín
At a junction on Carrera 55, Spider-Man stands at a red light selling sweets between the cars. A motorbike rider behind him, a water stall beside him.
8 September · Note · Café Mattelsa, Medellín
Café Mattelsa, two hours, one coffee and a kombucha. A Czech standard for electrical installations on the screen, a palm tree outside the window, people with laptops all around, and nobody making a…
7 September · Note
A pillion passenger on a motorbike carrying a large wheeled suitcase. One arm clamped around it, the other around the rider, knees against the tank, riding in traffic between the cars.
6 September · Article · Comuna 8, Villa Hermosa, Medellín
A tram on rubber tyres takes you from the centre to the edge of the city, and a cable car lifts you from there over the roofs of comuna 8. Back down there was an arepa festival, parakeets in a tree, a café in the house by the church, and a concert hall underground.
6 September · Article · La Candelaria, Medellín
Every second person told me not to go into the centre of Medellín. I went by metro, cleaner than the one at home, and found a palace with a chequerboard facade, twenty three Botero sculptures, a cathedral made of a million bricks, and a market that has run since the seventies.
5 September · Note
The botanical garden was closed. Not for a holiday or repairs: they are building the Fiesta del Libro y la Cultura inside it, the city's book festival, in its twentieth year and running from 11 to 20…
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