Villa Hermosa: lunch, a church and a market

I had seen comuna 8 from above, from the cable car. This day I spent an afternoon inside it, in the street and at a table, and it is an entirely different experience.

Where it is

Villa Hermosa is a barrio on the eastern slope above the centre and also the name of the whole comuna 8. The streets are narrow, steep and full of cars; around them stand two and three storey brick buildings, a shop below, a flat above, laundry on the roof.

No visitor comes here on their own and there is nothing here for them. Which is exactly why it is worth it.

Lunch

I was given a home cooked bandeja paisa, and it is not a dish you can describe briefly: beans, rice, minced meat, sausage, a fried egg, a slice of plantain, avocado, an arepa, and with it chicharrón, pork belly fried crisp.

It comes from the food of the arrieros, the muleteers who carried goods across the Antioquian mountains in the nineteenth century and needed one meal to last a day. The name bandeja paisa only appeared around 1950.

The chicharrón was the best part. Glass outside, soft inside, salted exactly right.

The church

Above the barrio stands the church of La Sagrada Familia, Carrera 39A number 66-38. Brick outside; inside a high nave with an exposed steel roof, wooden pews, and coloured windows dropping blue and yellow light into the room.

I was there on a Friday afternoon, about ten people inside and complete calm, twenty metres from a street where the buses are sounding their horns.

The street

Around the church is the other world: stalls, traders, fruit, phone cases, sweets, shoes. Traffic that makes no sense until you notice that everybody is going by eye contact rather than by signs.

I bought a buñuelo, a fried ball of corn flour and cheese the size of a fist, for a few thousand pesos. You eat it hot and it is the best snack I know in Colombia.

A stop in Prado

On the way back we stopped in Prado, the district immediately north of the centre where the villas of the early twentieth century stand. It is the best preserved historic neighbourhood in Medellín and that is exactly why people come.

We sat inside one of those houses, in a patio with a tiled fountain and plants up to the ceiling. The difference between that and a street in Villa Hermosa twenty minutes earlier is the whole of Medellín in one afternoon's drive.

What I take from it

From the cable car, comuna 8 is roofs. Close up it is a neighbourhood where on a Friday afternoon people cook, go to church, sell on the street and sound their horns.

The second version is the truer one.