Is Medellín Really That Dangerous?

“Isn’t Medellín dangerous?”

That was one of the questions we heard before we went. Not once, but again and again. People would hear that we were going to Medellín and immediately ask whether we were sure about it. We had heard enough stories ourselves to know why they were asking. Crime, drugs, the history of the city, things that had happened there years ago. And then there was everything we had seen online. So I won’t pretend we arrived without any concerns. We were both a little nervous when we first got there.

But then we actually started experiencing the city.

We stayed in Laureles, used the Metro, took Ubers, walked around, went out, met people and explored different parts of Medellín. We were obviously still aware of our surroundings, especially at night, and we weren’t trying to prove anything by taking unnecessary risks. But after a while, I realized that I wasn’t constantly thinking about whether something was going to happen to us. I was thinking about where we were going to eat, what we were going to do that day, which dance class we wanted to take or where we could get the best mango.

And that probably says more about our experience than anything else.

What surprised me most was how quickly the image I had built up before arriving started to disappear. Of course, Medellín has real problems. We saw things that reminded us of that, and I would never want to pretend otherwise. But the city we experienced was also full of people doing completely ordinary things. People going to work. Families spending time together. Friends meeting for coffee. People taking the Metro, getting haircuts, shopping, laughing, dancing and simply living their lives.

Those things sound so obvious when you write them down. But I think they are exactly what gets lost when we only know a place from the outside.

Before travelling, I had definitely done this myself. You hear that a country is dangerous, poor, corrupt or unsafe, and without really noticing it, you start putting the entire place into one category. You don’t necessarily mean to judge the people who live there. You just don’t know enough about the place to see anything beyond the version you have been shown.

Something that made me think about this even more was talking to people we met along the way who came from countries that are often described as dangerous. Some of them told us that they don’t like seeing their home reduced to that one label. And honestly, I understand that. Because a country can have serious problems, and the people who live there can still be kind, welcoming, funny, hardworking and completely ordinary.

A country can be dangerous in certain places or situations. That doesn’t automatically make the people who live there dangerous. I think that distinction is something I hadn’t really thought about before travelling.

It also made me start asking a different question. Instead of simply asking, “Is this country dangerous?”, why don’t we ask why it is considered dangerous in the first place? What happened there? Why are certain problems so common? Who is actually affected by them? And what does everyday life look like for the people who live there?

Those questions don’t make crime or other serious problems disappear. They don’t mean you should ignore warnings or travel somewhere without doing your research. But they give you a chance to understand a place instead of only being afraid of it. And I think that was the biggest difference for us in Medellín.

We didn’t arrive and suddenly decide that everything we had heard was wrong. We simply realized that there was much more to the city than what we had heard before coming.

Our experience also doesn’t mean that everyone who visits Medellín will experience it in exactly the same way. We were there for a limited amount of time, and we experienced the city as travellers. There are people who live there and experience its problems every day in ways we could never fully understand from a short visit. I think it is important to acknowledge that too.

For me, the point isn’t that Medellín is safe or that it is dangerous. The point is that it is a real place, and real places are rarely that simple.

There are beautiful parts and difficult parts. There are places where you should be careful and places where you can simply sit down, have a coffee and watch the world go by. There are serious problems, but there are also millions of people whose lives have nothing to do with the stories that made their city famous around the world. And maybe that’s what travelling has changed most for me.

I still listen when people warn me about a place. I still do my research. I still take precautions. But I don’t want someone else’s fear to become my entire understanding of somewhere I’ve never been. Because before we went to Medellín, I was asking myself whether the city was as dangerous as everyone said.

After spending time there, I found myself asking a much more interesting question:
How much of a place do we really know when we’ve only ever heard about it from the outside?

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Written by Fabienne, Medellin, Colombia