Narcos in Reality: I Followed Pablo Escobar in His Hometown and Here's What Went Down

I watched Pablo Escobar Del Maa and Narcos on Netflix after I did this tour. The first is a Colombian series on Escobar and the tag line of this series is,”Quien No Conoce Su Historia Esta Condenada A Repetirla”. It translates into,”Those who don’t understand their history are doomed to repeat it”.

Medellín was not on my list of places to go in Colombia when I first started planning a trip to this beautiful country. My husband insisted on going to Medellín and we added it to our list of places to go. I was honestly not interested in doing a full day tour visiting places which are prominent in Pablo Escobar’s life. There is so much media available on whether you should or should not do this tour, I am no authority on morality so I would rather just focus on what we did on the tour and let you decide.

If you feel that the tours in Medellín are making money from the crimes of Escobar, you are absolutely right but is it right or wrong to do this tour is debatable. If it’s legally allowed by their government and these tours take place openly, I personally don’t see taking this tour as being wrong. I must say that Pablo Escobar’s presence is omnipresent in Medellín because this part of Colombia’s history is very recent. I was in Medellín for four days and spoke to at least a dozen of people from Uber drivers to hotel staff to random strangers. The opinions about him are extremely divided from love to hatred to indifference. I just could not understand why tourists and locals bring flowers to his grave, it’s hard to understand how some Colombians love him despite of the attacks and killings on their fellow country men.

There is a souvenir shop dedicated to the life and times of Pablo Escobar in the neighbourhood he built. I jokingly asked my guide,”why would anybody buy these souvenirs” and he told me that there was a Russian tourist who spent a million pesos which is roughly 320 USD. I wanted to convert it before you go check on google, a million does sound like a crazy amount but it sounds better when you say 300USD. In any case, there are people spending on T-Shirts and coffee cups with Escobar's face on it and it’s common to see his face on various commodities tourist typically buy like keychains etc.

The tour takes you to the Monaco Building, La Catedral, his gravesite, Pablo Escobar neighborhood built by him, Communa 13 and the house where he was shot. You could do all this by yourself but we really enjoyed this guided tour, our guide was funny and he said he hated Escobar. I asked a girl who was selling souvenirs of Escobar and she said that she hated him too. I honestly don’t want to be judgmental on why they are making money from his crimes if they hate him. I have to admit that this was a question which kept running through my head but I ended up participating in this tour too although I know he is a criminal so I realized that for the tour operators and souvenir shop owners, it is a way of making money right now. Tourism was booming In Medellín when I visited and the Pablo Escobar tour is very highly rated amongst all the tours In Medellín.