Pablo Escobar purchased Hacienda Nápoles in 1978, located 93 miles east of Medellín in Puerto Triunfo, Antioquia. At 7.7 square miles, it became one of the most extraordinary private estates ever built: a Spanish colonial mansion, a private airstrip, swimming pools, man-made lakes, a bullring, a go-kart track, life-sized dinosaur sculptures, and a zoo stocked with elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, and exotic birds. At the entrance arch — the gateway to all of it — Escobar mounted a replica of the small plane he used to fly his first cocaine shipment into the United States. The estate was built with cartel money and maintained alongside the bombings, assassinations, and murders the Medellín Cartel carried out across Colombia throughout the 1980s. Escobar was shot dead by Colombian police in December 1993.
What the Colombian government inherited was both a ruined estate and a wildlife problem. Most animals were transferred to other facilities. The hippos were another matter. Four remained on the property, escaped, and began to breed. By the time researchers assessed the situation in earnest, an estimated population of up to one hundred hippos was living in and around the Magdalena River basin — some spotted nearly a hundred miles from the estate. Warning signs on the property now read: Peligro: Presencia de Hipopótamos. In 2006, the estate was declared state property, valued at approximately $2.23 million. A private company later converted it into Parque Temático Hacienda Nápoles: a water park, butterfly farm, wildlife sanctuary, and Memorial Museum occupying the same ground where Escobar’s mansion stood.
The plane is still on the arch. The Memorial Museum is open. The ruins of the mansion are accessible through the vegetation. People have been caught digging on the property at night, searching for buried cartel money. The ghosts of Hacienda Nápoles do not appear in doorways — they appear in hippo warning signs posted along river paths in a country where hippos have no business being, in a Memorial Museum that had to be built because a waterpark alone would not be sufficient, in ruins that are simultaneously a tourist attraction and a record of what produced them.
Story Source: allthatsinteresting.com
Address: Hacienda Nápoles, Puerto Triunfo, Antioquia, Colombia
Accessibility Rating: Open to All — Freely accessible to the public with no advance requirement. Includes hotels, restaurants, bars, and public historic sites where visitors may walk in without prior booking.
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What Others Have Experienced
The variety here is both the draw and the cognitive dissonance — history museum, personal zoo, roller coasters, and water park all occupying the same property. Once you understand the history, that combination is what stays with you.
— from TripAdvisor
Some of the animal enclosures feel more melancholy than expected — large creatures from a collection Escobar assembled for his own entertainment, now wandering paddocks on their own in the Colombian heat. Bring water; the distances between attractions are vast.
— from TripAdvisor
The drive here is nearly four hours from Medellín on a winding road — which somehow fits, given how deliberately Escobar kept this estate hidden from the world. The hippos descended from his original four are the signature draw, though they tend to disappear during the heat of the day.
— from TripAdvisor
The historical section made a far deeper impression than the water slides. The museum inside the ruins of Pablo’s former house walks room to room through bombings, assassinations, and campaigns of terror — sobering in a way that doesn’t leave you quickly.
— from TripAdvisor
A local guide hired at the entrance makes the whole property legible — the strange mix of amusement rides, abandoned helicopter pads, and crumbling ruins makes no sense without the context of what actually happened here. Worth every peso.
— from TripAdvisor
