Visit Moravia Barrio Tour: the sowers of life in Medellin

We tell you time and time again on our travel blog that, in Colombia, the more you try to take a step to the side, the more surprises you’ll find, and a visit to Medellin’s Moravia district is one of them.

Of course, if the classics are the classics, it’s because they’re often places of obvious interest. But Colombia has many well-kept secrets.

Today’s post is part of that huge piece of the iceberg that we never knew existed, of all those Colombian treasures that you just have to want to discover. Come on, we’ll take you to Medellin, to visit Comuna 4 and the Moravia district, in a wonderful dive between past, present and future!

Disclaimer: we apologize in advance for any grammatical or syntactic errors, as our native language is not English (we're a Colombian-French couple), so we hope you'll forgive us and still enjoy the information we share with you! Please note that all the information on our blog is based on our own experience, and is checked and updated regularly.

Contents

1. Moravia or the mountain of shame

2. Moravia and garbage becomes flowers

3. Moravia and rooted hope

4. Get in touch with a local guide

5. How to get to Moravia

Related posts

• Best things to do in Medellin
• Best things to do around Medellin
• Comuna 13
• Jerico
• Guatape
• Rafting in Medellin

Buy it

Moravia or the mountain of shame

VISIT MORAVIA IN english

As we mentioned in our post on Comuna 13, the armed conflict in Colombia has led to powerful population movements, from region to region, and from the countryside to the cities. In search of protection, many peasants have moved to Medellín. With no money and no work, most of the new arrivals had no choice but to settle wherever they could, in an anarchic fashion, and build themselves a little shack with whatever they could find. As a result, Medellín saw the development of numerous shantytowns on its outskirts, a phenomenon that can be found all over the world.

Moravia was one such shantytown, but it has its own tragic history. In the 1960s, in the absence of municipal waste management, a vacant lot was transformed into Medellín’s largest open-air landfill. A wild heap of rubbish where truckloads came to dump anything and everything. The kind of place where the poorest people came to collect whatever they could to support themselves, to eat, to dress, to salvage in the hope of earning a few pesos to survive.

Over the years, this landfill became their home, literally. People began to build shacks, out of bricks and mortar, out of what they found there, out of the mountain of garbage. Houses built from plastic, wood and cardboard literally merged with the garbage. An unimaginable place, an idea of the end of the world. Yet a place of life… so much so that the landfill has become an integral part of the Moravia district, known as “el Morro”, with hundreds of people living day by day in the middle of the hell.

El Morro is a place that can be discovered today through a tour featuring an exhibition of impressive period photos.

Moravia and garbage becomes flowers

Barrio Moravio Tour

Moravia, Medellin

We head for the main avenue leading to the Moravia district. One small shop after another, various trades, repairmen of all kinds, the fruit juice vendor and his little stools to sit and enjoy. With our noses in the exhaust fumes, the atmosphere is a bit messy and lively, typical of Colombia.

We arrive at the neighborhood’s cultural center, which opened a few years ago and is now Moravia’s nerve center. A place to live, a place to meet, a place to learn, a place to remember, when you bet on culture, you often win… here’s another example.

The closer we get to the old dump, the more we enter the heart of Moravia. The alleyways become smaller, brick houses follow one another and part of the history is written on the walls. If Comuna 13 is the temple of street art in Medellín, it’s also and inevitably present in Moravia!

Moravia’s village atmosphere speaks of the unity of its population, which is the strength of the district. It also speaks of its resilience. This is what we’re going to discover in the most concrete of ways when we arrive at the foot of the “Morro”. Many questions ran through our minds before discovering the site, a former open-air rubbish dump… what has become of it? Seen from here, we see grass, a pathway, flowerbeds, landscaping… where has all the garbage gone?

As we make our way along the flowery path, we come across an open-air exhibition of vintage photographs tracing the history of the “Morro”. We realize that every step we take is on a mountain of garbage over 30 m high. Millions of tons of garbage stare down at us from under a few centimetres of earth and weeds. Here, children play ball. A few families attached to their homes still live there. We are gripped by emotion. And when, at a bend in the path, you see the layers of garbage on the hillside, like strata of filthy memory, you understand the scale of the project that has been underway here since 2005.

The choice that has been made here to get the neighborhood out of the shit, let’s not mince words, is a strong, powerful one. Developing a social and environmental project in the very place where, for years, the poorest of the poor have survived in the middle of hell, with all the health and safety problems that this has engendered, is a powerful choice.

The exhibition along the trail is beautiful and educational. The black-and-white photos are impressive, showing life as hard as it was.

Moravia and rooted hope

VISIT MORAVIA with a local guide

Thousands of flowers and plants now grow on the slopes of the rubbish dump where the inhabitants of El Morro once lived. At the top, a huge nursery where all kinds of plantations are grown to develop a local economy. At the foot, another, more modest nursery, that of William and the gardeners of the Jarum cooperative.

In the midst of his small nursery, William takes the time to explain the history of this gardeners’ cooperative. It all started with the movement initiated by the “Moravia florece para la vida” (Moravia blooms for life) project to transform the mountain of waste into a landscaped garden. The idea is to show that if you can change the life of a neighborhood with flowers, then maybe you can go even further. Their aim is to develop a local garden center business, bring life to the city and promote an environmental vision of urban planning.

In the meantime, we’re helping them to replant trees in the neighborhood, not a little proud to be the “godfather” of a little “guayacan” which, we hope, will grow big and light up the neighborhood with its golden leaves!

Today in Moravia, as elsewhere in Medellín, or in Colombia in general, people are trying to get back on their feet and build something positive, helping each other and moving forward. The mountain of garbage has become a green hill, where community projects are helping to protect the environment and bring about social change in the neighbourhood.

Hope is on the horizon, and William and all the gardeners of the Jarum cooperative are not about to let it slip away!