Medellín in 4 Days: Cables, Escalators and the Hillside City

Medellín is the only Colombian city with a metro, and one Cívica card covers the trains, the tram, the feeder buses and five of the six cable lines, with transfers free inside a 90 minute window. That means the famous Metrocable climb to Santo Domingo costs nothing on top of a metro fare of about 4,400 pesos, while the sixth line is priced as a tourist attraction: Cable Arví charges a foreign visitor 26,700 pesos per trip against 11,900 for a Colombian with a personalised card and 3,900 for a local household in the lowest utility brackets, so one return ride costs more than the rest of day 3 combined. These four days are arranged so you ride the whole public network on a transit fare and meet the visitor pricing exactly once, on a single planned day that reaches a 16,000 hectare cloud forest in under an hour rather than spending four hours on the road to Guatapé, and where the marked trails carry their own two tier ticket on top of the cable. Two closure days do the rest of the pinning: the Arví cable and the park it serves shut every Tuesday, while Parque Explora, the Casa de la Memoria and the modern art museum all shut on Mondays.