[ DISCOVERY · THE DISPATCH ]

I Spent 72 Hours in Medellín Following Only Locals' Taxi Recommendations

I handed my itinerary to Medellín's taxi drivers for 72 hours. What I found was a completely different city — one TripAdvisor will never show you.

Planning the trip? Start with the plan your Medellin trip day by day — it lays out exactly where to go, and when.

Here’s how it started: I was in the back of a white Renault Logan, stuck in the kind of Medellín traffic that somehow feels friendly rather than aggressive, and the driver — a guy named Camilo with a Virgin Mary air freshener and a cracked phone mount — asked me where I was from.

I told him. He nodded. Then he asked where I was planning to eat dinner.

I said I’d seen a highly-rated spot in El Poblado.

He laughed. Not unkindly. Just that specific laugh that translates universally as oh, you poor tourist.

That’s when I decided to scrap my whole plan.

For 72 hours, I would take taxis exclusively — no Uber, no InDrive, no metro (sorry, metro). And every single recommendation for food, neighborhoods, bars, and hidden spots would come from drivers. I asked each one the same four questions:

1. Where do you eat when you want something good and cheap?
2. What neighborhood should I actually be staying in?
3. Where do locals go on a Friday night?
4. What’s one place tourists never go that you think is genuinely worth visiting?

I took about 14 rides over three days. Here’s the portrait they painted.

Nine out of fourteen drivers mentioned Laureles unprompted when I asked about neighborhoods. Not El Poblado — which nearly every guidebook defaults to — but the leafy, circular grid of Laureles-Estadio, west of the river.

“El Poblado is for people who want to feel safe thinking about Colombia,” one driver told me, in better English than I deserved. “Laureles is Colombia.”

He wasn’t wrong. I spent my second afternoon walking Avenida El Poblado’s lesser-known cousin, Carrera 70, and it was genuinely one of the best streets I found in the city. Restaurants spill onto sidewalks, prices drop by roughly 40 percent compared to Parque Lleras, and the clientele is almost entirely local. I had a bandeja paisa at a place with plastic chairs and no English menu for about 18,000 COP — roughly four dollars — and it was better than the version I’d paid three times as much for the day before.

If you’re planning a real trip and want to spend your time more wisely, check out this comprehensive Medellín itinerary — it’ll help you map out the neighborhoods before you land.

This one came from a driver named Jorge, who was seventy-something years old and had been driving taxis in Medellín since 1987. He told me not to bother with the empanadas anywhere “with a sign in English.”

He directed me to a corner on Calle 33 near Avenida Oriental — no name, just a woman with a cart, 1,200 COP per empanada, open from about noon to whenever she sells out (usually around 2 p.m.). They’re the small, crimped kind with potato and meat inside, fried dark, served with ají.

I ate four. I went back the next day and ate three more.

This is the kind of tip that doesn’t exist in any app. It exists in the accumulated knowledge of a man who’s driven past that corner ten thousand times.

Three different drivers, independently, told me to go to La América on a Friday. Not to a specific bar — just to go to La América.

So I did. I got dropped off at a corner near the Parque de La América around 9 p.m. and just walked. What I found was a neighborhood absolutely alive with locals: families outside, corner stores with plastic stools, small salsa bars with no cover charge and no bouncers checking whether you looked like a backpacker.

I ended up at a place that had maybe thirty people inside, a sound system that was definitely too large for the room, and a bartender who insisted I try aguardiente mixed with something green he wouldn’t name. It tasted like anise and ambition.

I stayed until midnight. It cost me about 35,000 COP including drinks. On a Friday in El Poblado, that wouldn’t get me through the door.

This kind of thing is exactly why I find myself increasingly drawn to transportation-as-curation — it’s the same instinct that made me fall for Bangkok’s river taxi system when I was in Southeast Asia. Local transit routes are, fundamentally, local knowledge routes.

Every taxi driver I talked to mentioned the graffiti in Comuna 13, and most tourists know about it at that point. But one driver — a younger guy named Sebastián who’d grown up in the neighborhood — told me to skip the organized tour entirely and instead walk up through the escaleras (outdoor escalators) on a weekday morning, before 10 a.m.

“The tours come at 11,” he said. “Before that, it’s just people going to work. You see it different.”

He was right. I went at 8:45 on a Tuesday. The murals were the same, but the context was completely different — kids heading to school, women carrying groceries, the escalators doing their actual job rather than serving as a photo backdrop. I felt like I was in a neighborhood, not an attraction.

It’s the kind of shift in experience that’s hard to quantify but impossible to unfeel. And it cost me exactly one taxi fare and an early alarm.

Here’s the thing about following taxi recommendations: it’s not about finding secret places that are technically better. Some of the spots were fine, not extraordinary. The real value is the framing.

When Camilo laughed at my El Poblado dinner plan, he wasn’t being dismissive. He was offering me a corrective. He was saying: there is another city here, and you are about to miss it.

I’ve done similar experiments elsewhere — spending time in Lisbon’s less-obvious corners and Japan’s non-temple side — and the pattern holds: the best travel experiences come when you hand your agenda to someone who actually lives there.

Medellín’s taxi drivers are alot more than a way to get from A to B. They’re a distributed network of encyclopedic local knowledge, available at 8,000 pesos a conversation.

If you want to go deeper on Latin America before you go, the Americas itinerary hub has a ton of context on budgets, timing, and regional logistics.

• Best time to chat: Longer rides (10+ minutes) and morning trips before 9 a.m. — drivers are less harried, more talkative
• Language: Basic Spanish helps enormously. “¿Dónde come usted?” (Where do you eat?) opens more doors than any phrasebook tip
• Safety: Stick to metered or agreed-price taxis, avoid flagging cabs near tourist hotspots late at night, use a registered app if you’re nervous — though I genuinely had zero issues in 14 rides
• Timing: This experiment works best mid-week; weekend drivers are busier and less inclined to chat

The real Medellín isn’t hidden — it’s just one question away, in the front seat.

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