No water after eight in the evening. What is going on in Medellín

Since 31 August, part of Medellín has had no water at night. Not a burst pipe, not maintenance: there simply is not enough. The measure covers 109,235 connections, roughly three hundred thousand people, about seven per cent of the city's water customers.

I live in Conquistadores on the other side of the valley and it does not touch me yet. That is exactly the uncomfortable part. A city where one person knows about the restriction from the news and another fills canisters every evening is still one city.

This piece is about what the rule actually says, why it landed on these particular neighbourhoods, how it connects to the heat that broke records here in May, and what it all means for someone planning to come. The figures come from research done on 10 September 2026 and each one carries the date it applies to. In a month they may look different.

What applies and where

Rationing began on Monday 31 August. It runs every other day in two schemes that alternate: the first started on Monday, the second on Tuesday. At first the cut ran from six in the evening to five in the morning, eleven hours. Since 8 September it is shorter, eight hours between eight in the evening and four in the morning.

Ten circuits are affected, across six communes:

• Popular, comuna 1
• Manrique, comuna 3
• Aranjuez, comuna 4
• Villa Hermosa, comuna 8
• Buenos Aires, comuna 9
• La Candelaria, comuna 10

Two of them I know from up close and they have their own pages here: Villa Hermosa and the old centre. Neither is a tourist backdrop. Both are places where people simply live.

During the cuts, six routes run with tankers, four regular ones and two fitted with drums, between half past six and half past nine in the evening. They serve priority sectors, not anyone who asks.

EPM said openly that the schedule will change with the rain and with consumption. Circuits may be added, hours may shift, or the whole thing may end. On 7 September the mayor, Federico Gutiérrez, added that the restrictions could spread to other parts of the city and to the metropolitan area if consumption does not come down and stay down.

The savings target the city set: 92 litres per person per day in the critical zones, 70 litres in the rest of the city.

Why it landed on the hillsides

It looks like a poverty map and in effect it partly is one, but the decision was technical.

This part of Medellín depends on the Piedras Blancas reservoir above Santa Elena. It is the smallest reservoir in the EPM system, the one with the least stored volume, and it sits high above the city, so water reaches the upper neighbourhoods by gravity. When it drops, the highest houses lose out first.

Santiago Wilches, who runs water and sewerage at EPM, put it plainly: Piedras Blancas holds the least and is short of 120 litres per second. That is ten million litres a day, about five Olympic pools that do not arrive where they should.

Why not move water from elsewhere? The system is interconnected and the La Fe and Río Grande reservoirs do have water. But permanent support from them would, according to EPM, raise the risk of shortage in other parts of the valley. Translated into the language I know from work: you can draw on a reserve for a week, not for a quarter of a year.

Then there is consumption. Between 18 and 24 August the city used 48 million litres more than the week before. That is not heat on its own. That is heat plus people showering twice a day in it.

The heat that rewrote the records

In the last days of May, Ideam measured temperatures in the Aburrá valley that it had never measured before:

• the station at Olaya Herrera airport hit 33.8 degrees, beating 33.6 from 2019
• the Tulio Ospina station in Bello hit 34.8 degrees, beating 34.2 from 2015
• the La Aldea station in Medellín hit 30.4 degrees, beating 29.8 from 2020

The margins look small. But records at a climate station do not fall by tenths very often, and here three fell at once.

The why is more interesting. DAGRD, the city's disaster risk office, together with SIATA and Ideam, said something you would not expect: this particular heat is not El Niño. It is the shape of the valley plus a run of atmospheric conditions.

The Aburrá valley is a narrow bowl ringed by mountains. By day a clear sky lets more solar radiation through and it goes into the asphalt and concrete. In the evening cloud moves in over a city that is already hot, and cloud over a hot city works like a blanket: it keeps the heat from escaping upward. Julián Sepúlveda of SIATA added the figures on nights running about two degrees above normal and climbing towards thirty.

This is the part you will not find in the brochure about the city of eternal spring. Eternal spring meant nobody built for air conditioning. Most flats do not have it and most buildings have nowhere to put it.

El Niño has not arrived yet

The important part: what happened in May and what is happening now is not the peak. The peak is expected around the turn of the year.

On 15 May the national government issued a warning in which Ideam put the probability at 82 per cent for the May to July quarter and 96 per cent by the end of the year, at an intensity between strong and very strong. More recent estimates give 81 per cent that El Niño reaches the very strong category between October and December, and more than 97 per cent that its effects last into March 2027.

The director of Ideam, Ghisliane Echeverry, pointed out that rainfall has been falling steadily since March. Carlos Carrillo of the disaster management agency said measures should be taken now rather than when the drought arrives. In May that sounded like an official phrase. In September it reads differently.

Electricity is the other half of the same problem

Colombia generates most of its electricity from water. Less water therefore means not only less to drink but less power, and both come out of the same reservoirs.

XM, the national grid operator, warned back in July that demand could outrun generation around the turn of 2026 and 2027. The figures behind that:

• June 2026 demand rose 5.75 per cent year on year to 261.86 GWh a day, the highest in the country's recent history
• an estimated annual shortfall of 3,906 GWh
• 4,475 MW of new capacity was planned for 2026; by 2 July, 331 MW was actually running
• between 1 January and 19 August the dispatch centre issued 304 load disconnection instructions, which is quiet, technical rationing
• reservoir levels across the system hovered around 79 per cent over the summer, against a recommended level above 80 per cent going into a dry season
• under a very strong El Niño, XM projects the aggregate level falling to 19.3 per cent in December, which would be the lowest in the history of the system

For comparison: the worst season so far, 2024 into 2025, bottomed out at twenty seven per cent.

Bad luck with maintenance is stacked on top. Guavio, the largest hydro plant in the country, will be working on its intake from September to December and will run run of river, meaning only on what arrives each day, with no access to its reserve. Chivor requested maintenance from October 2026 to June 2027. Both supply the east, so the rationing risk concentrates on Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Meta and Guaviare. The other exposed region is the Caribbean coast.

EPM raised its electricity rationing risk to orange back in July. Its manager John Maya said it without cushioning: the phenomenon has barely started and consumption is already over the line, which may lead to rationing sooner rather than later. EPM reservoirs stood at 84.2 per cent at that point, the national average at 78.8.

The date I am watching is 1 December. If reservoirs are not above eighty per cent by then, the country enters the strongest phase of the drought without a margin.

It is not only Medellín

The news covers Medellín because it is the second city. Smaller towns are worse off.

In Santander, eleven municipalities are rationing water because of falling river flows. Málaga is the worst, with cuts reaching about seven hours overnight and in the early morning. Capitanejo and Oiba have declared a public calamity. The Topocoro reservoir has dropped eight metres below its normal level and tankers are running to the towns.

Two names on that list are also on my bucket list: Barichara, the sandstone town often called the prettiest in the country, and Guadalupe, the way in to Las Gachas. That is the part of the research that made me reshuffle my own plans.

In Cundinamarca, Villeta, Puerto Salgar, Guaduas, Vianí, Beltrán, Chaguaní, Anapoima, Apulo, El Colegio, La Mesa and Viotá all report trouble, some with restrictions two or three days a week. Bogotá itself says its system will hold for at least six months, which after the rationing of 2024 sounds almost surprising.

A safety person's view, since I have one

None of this is in a press release. It comes from my own trade, so it belongs here.

Water standing in buckets breeds mosquitoes. Aedes aegypti, which carries dengue, breeds in clean standing water and needs only a few days and a pot. In a country where dengue is a routine diagnosis, a lid is the difference between a reserve and a problem. EPM itself says stored water keeps its quality for about twenty four hours.

Darkness invites candles. If power restrictions do arrive, flats with no window onto the corridor will be genuinely dark. A candle on a plastic saucer next to a curtain is the classic that fire services back home investigate every winter. A head torch costs less than one callout.

When supply returns, the tap gives you air and sediment. Letting it run for a while is not excessive caution, it is the normal procedure. The same goes for instantaneous water heaters, which should not be switched on against an empty pipe.

Lifts. People get shut in them during power cuts, and in the sixteen storey towers of El Poblado that is not a thought experiment. It is worth knowing where the emergency call button is and whether it actually rings anywhere.

What it means for a trip

If you are coming in the next few months:

• Ask about water when you book, not when you arrive. The question is whether the building has its own tank, and whether the address falls in one of the affected circuits.
• The tourist neighbourhoods are outside the restriction for now. El Poblado, Laureles and Envigado sit on other reservoirs. That does not mean they will stay that way, only that today they do.
• The centre is on the list. La Candelaria is one of the six communes, so accommodation downtown is the address worth asking about twice.
• Treat it as a reason to get up early. The cut is at night, so the water is on in the morning. Anyone who gets used to showering at six will not notice.
• Go north and into the hills with a margin. Santander and part of Cundinamarca have restrictions in towns with one hotel and no spare tanker.
• Follow EPM's announcements, not the news. The schedule changes, and the papers always print yesterday's.

What I will be watching

Three things. Whether the circuits spread beyond those six communes, because that would mean consumption has not come down. Whether reservoir levels clear eighty per cent by 1 December, because that is the threshold the energy people keep naming. And whether the first planned electricity restrictions arrive, because technical disconnections are already happening, they are just not called that.

When any of it moves, I will write it up here. For now it looks like this: the city of eternal spring is having the hottest year it has ever measured, and three hundred thousand of its residents fill a bucket every evening.