Medellín Botanical Garden, Metrocable & Arví Park City Tour

Medellín’s Green Landscape

A Medellín Botanical Garden and Arví Park tour gives you the two sides of this city that most visitors miss entirely on their first trip: the green, living infrastructure that Medellín has built inside its own urban grid, and the protected forest reserve that sits on the mountains above it, accessible by cable car in under 30 minutes. Together, they explain something important about how Medellín thinks about itself — as a city that has not just rebuilt from violence but actively designed its own recovery into the landscape.

Jardín Botánico de Medellín

The Jardín Botánico de Medellín sits in the heart of the city near Universidad de Antioquia, one of the most intellectually dense neighbourhoods in Colombia. The university zone includes Explora Park — a science museum and aquarium — Ruta N, the city’s innovation and technology hub, and Deseos Park, all within walking distance. The Botanical Garden occupies 14 hectares at the centre of this activity, and it operates as something more specific than a park: it is a living museum dedicated to the conservation and study of Colombian biodiversity, with over 1,000 plant species including one of the most significant orchid collections in South America. Colombia is the world’s most biodiverse country per square kilometre, and the Botanical Garden is a deliberate statement of that identity placed at the middle of the city’s most public zone. Walking through it with a guide who understands both the ecology and the urban planning context around it produces a different kind of visit than simply following the paths.

The Metrocable: A City Seen from Above

The Metrocable is one of Medellín’s most discussed urban interventions. Launched in the mid-2000s as part of the city’s broader programme of social urbanism, the cable car system was built to connect the comunas on the steep eastern and western hillsides to the metro network below. Before the cable car, residents of neighbourhoods like Santo Domingo faced an hour-long journey on foot or by bus down the hillside to reach the city centre. The cable car reduced that to minutes. Line K runs from Acevedo station up through the comunas to Santo Domingo, offering a continuous aerial view of Medellín’s hillside housing — the dense, colourful urbanism of a city that grew vertically along its slopes. Line L continues from Santo Domingo up into the mountains to the Arví station, leaving the city grid behind and entering forest within minutes. The ride is a transition between two completely different Medellíns, visible in real time from the cable car cabin.

Arví Park

Arví Park covers over 16,000 hectares of protected forest and ecological reserve on the eastern slopes of the Andes above the city, spanning multiple municipalities including Medellín, Envigado, Bello, and Guarne. The park was formally established in the early 2010s as a collaboration between the city’s major institutions — EPM, the Medellín Metro, and Comfenalco among others — with the specific goal of preserving the cloud forest that serves as Medellín’s primary watershed. The forest here captures rainfall, feeds the rivers that supply the city, and maintains a biodiversity corridor for hundreds of bird species and Andean flora that no longer exist in the urbanised valley below. Walking its trails with a guide who knows the park’s indigenous paths, its water streams, and its natural viewpoints gives you a substantially different experience from arriving alone: the park is large, its trails are not always obvious, and the forest itself — dense, misty, and acoustically alive with birds — deserves explanation to be fully understood.

One Day, Two Parks, One Cable Car

What makes this combination tour work as a single day is the way the Metrocable connects the two parks. You don’t need a separate vehicle to travel from the Botanical Garden to Arví — the cable car is the bridge, and the aerial journey between the two is as much a part of the experience as either destination. Very few cities in the world offer a transition from an urban botanical garden to a protected mountain forest reserve via a 30-minute cable car ride over the rooftops of a hillside community. Medellín does, and it built this infrastructure on purpose.