Casa Museo Pablo Escobar — Attraction in Medellín

AVOID. The worst kind of tourist trap: overpriced, tacky, underwhelming, and the worst sin of all, it's BORING. If you're at all familiar with any part of the Escobar story, you already know more than the tour guides will tell you. This stash house tells little of the cartel's story or its global impact. And you hardly get to see any of it. So much of the tale they spin is in the abstract, with very little to demonstrate how much a shoe box filled with a million dollars weighs, what a room filled with a billion dollars in shoe boxes looks like. The most concrete things you do see are a dresser with a false back for snyuggling cash and a garage filled with cars riddled with bullet holes. The entire thing is a gift shop, a PR laundromat for Pablo's legacy — which his family profits off of. When you first walk in, the guide pressures you into fist bumping a portrait of Escobar and taking a photo, which I didn't think is cute. I think it's a little monstrous and I didn't want to do it, but they force you to do it before they move on with the tour. Gross. At one point the guide breathlessly alludes to "artifacts" of Pablo's that you have to put a banknote into a slot in order to briefly see. The money is collected for "charity" by the family, supposedly. The tour guide will ask you for a tip at the end, but if the tour wasn't worth the price of admission, it's not worth a tip. Now to the greatest sin, how boring it all is. At one point, they have a little jail cell that you can take photos in. They have Pablo's picture up in there trying to make him look like a badass. However, the curators of this museum fail to recognize what a true badass is, it's not someone who looks mean behind bars – it's a man who constructed a jail cell that doesn't actually lock and that he can open on a whim, it's a guy who can order a government the terms of his surrender, order a prison be constructed for him, and who can choose the guards. Not even a diorama of The Cathedral to visualize it. Even if you want to tell a one-sided story, a hagiography celebrating his life and works, the curators misunderstand what is so compelling about Escobar's legacy: about the Robin Hood aspects of his charitable exploits, about the redistribution of global wealth, the sheer bloodymindedness and ingenuity. So much of the story is glossed over it's embarrassing. And there's so many interesting things they could do with the limited space and displays that they do have, the stories they could tell with models, practical displays you can touch, or a discussion on the impact of cocaine on race relations in the U.S., or any other negative aspects of his business. I mean c'mon, they barely mention the submarines and I...

Today 29/12/22 I visited this museum with my partner. The first thing that we found from this place it was the price for the entry was $90.000 Colombian pesos per person or $29 Australian dollars. I found very overpriced for Colombia however we decided to go and live the experience. Unfortunately when we get in to the tour. The tour guide was already with two people from England and he was already on his speech for almost 20 minutes. So as soon as we get into the group he finished his speech and said we won’t be able to hear what happened there. He was clearly annoyed and angry that we had been added to the group. He made no attempt to welcome us or anything. The tour guide was very rude and told us that he already has people who started the tour first and he wasn’t able to share the information about the two first stops in the tour. He also told us he wouldn’t share the information as he didn’t want to make anyone late.

It’s important to note here that the tours are not scheduled, you just rock up. So it isn’t that we showed up late, they just shoved us into a tour that had already started. There are other reviews that confirm this happens.

We had also paid for a full tour, not an abbreviated version because they added us to one that had already started.

During the next part of the the tour, the guide was only focused in the couple who was first and had no interest in including us during the tour or in answering our questions. We found him to be very rude and it was an uncomfortable atmosphere as he definitely did not want us there. I decided to speak with someone there about the problems.

That person referred us back to the tour guide. He totally denied being rude and simply said he could choose to tell us whatever he wanted. I speak Spanish and spoke to him about the situation in Spanish. At this point he became even more agitated and started to raise his voice. Unfortunately we were not able to continue the tour as his behaviour was not acceptable. We were very uncomfortable with the situation so we decided to ask to receive the money back because we didn’t stay there for more than 15 minutes. The people from there refused to give...

Tourist trap, don't go there!

The experience was bad from the beginning. We were supposed to start at 9:10, but instead the guide showed up late at around 10 AM without even excusing himself that he was late. We did get a free upgrade to the armoured car (don't pay extra for that, the car is junk), but an apology seems like the cordial thing to do.

After that we spent about 1 hour and a half inside a courtyard where we were shown some pictures and a couple of furniture pieces and vehicles that supposedly belonged to Escobar.

After that the guy drove us around Poblado and its surroundings where he showed us some sites which you should have easily found out about on the net. Nothing too interesting and it lasted about 40 mins with heavy traffic.

Then he dropped us off at our hotel (which was really close to the end point either way, so no bonus points there) but not before asking us for a tip.

Bear in mind that this wasn't cheap, it was 150,000 per person which is a lot for Medellin (approximately one month rent for someone living in Comuna 13).

Worst of all the museum belongs to one of the Escobar sons so all the info that was presented was extremely biased and in the end you support the son of a drug baron that according to the guide is already...