El Poblado Before the Mall: Memories of Chickens and Bareque

El Poblado Before the Mall: Memories of Chickens and Bareque

If you were born in Medellín before 1985, you probably remember that going to El Poblado wasn't "going to the mall." It was leaving the city. It was catching a bus on La Playa and crossing pastures, crossing streams over wooden bridges, and arriving at a village where the rooster crowed at four in the morning. Today, when people complain about traffic on Avenida El Poblado, few know that along this very road, forty years ago, carts with milk and trucks loaded with bricks moved. This article is not an inventory of restaurants or clothing stores. It is a journey into memory, an attempt to rescue what was buried under the cement of the malls. Because yes, in El Poblado there were chickens, there was bareque, and there was a life that doesn't appear in tourist guides.

The Mental Postcard: El Poblado in the 70s and 80s

Close your eyes. We are in 1978. Avenida El Poblado exists, but it is a narrow two-lane road, lined with mango trees and stone fences. On the sides, huge farms with single-story houses, clay tile roofs, and hallways full of sansevieria plants. In the backyard, a plot of packed earth where the creole chickens, those with shiny feathers that ate the corn kernels the children threw them, ran around. The smell wasn't of gasoline or mall perfume; it was of wet earth, ripe guava, and charcoal firewood for Sunday's sancocho.

The streams —La Presidenta, La Poblada, La Volcana— ran crystal clear. The boys bathed in the pools formed by the rocks, and the women washed clothes in the communal washbasins that still exist in some old houses. The streets had no names in many stretches; people said "where the Uribe family lives," "in front of the Echeverri pasture," or "two blocks from the mill." There were no traffic lights in Mayorca, no 4 Sur bridge, and much less a shopping center called Santafé. The San José parish was the center of the social universe, and the market square of El Poblado —which today is a parking lot— was the place where you bought the yucca, plantain, and farm cheese that came down from Santa Elena.

That rural life wasn't a fairy tale. It was hard work. But it had a cadence that seems impossible today: time was measured by the sun, not by the office clock. The farms produced coffee, plantain, avocado, and flowers. The pastures were rented out for cows to graze, which then sold milk in aluminum cans to the houses of the center. And at night, without the light pollution of the malls, the sky filled with stars that the 40-story buildings no longer let us see.

Stories from Three Original Residents

To understand what El Poblado was, you have to listen to those who lived it. Here are three stories from real people who grew up in the neighborhood before the brick fever. Their names are changed, but their stories are as true as the mud they stepped on.

Don Jesús, the Farmer Who Planted on the Hillside

Don Jesús is 84 years old and still lives in a house he inherited from his father, in the upper part of El Poblado, near where the El Corazón school is today. When he talks about his youth, his face lights up: "Everything here was wilderness. My dad planted corn and beans on the hillside, and I would go down with the donkeys to the market square to sell the ears of corn. That was at three in the morning, with a kerosene lantern, because there was no electricity in the upper villages until around '73."

Don Jesús remembers that the farms were watered with water from the streams, which was diverted with stone channels. "There was no public utilities aqueduct. Each farm had its own water source. Everyone knew each other, there were no doors with bars. You left your door open and nothing happened." The arrival of the first residential complexes, like the Unidad Residencial El Poblado in the 80s, took him by surprise: "Suddenly they started cutting down the trees to build buildings. I didn't understand why anyone would want to live so cramped, without a yard, without chickens."

Don Álvaro, the Construction Worker

Don Álvaro is 71 years old and came to Medellín from Sonsón at 15, looking for work. His first job was in the construction of the El Poblado bypass, in the late 70s. "That was pure bareque. The old farmhouses were made of bahareque —which in Medellín we call bareque—, a mixture of earth, wild cane, and horse manure that was placed between wooden slats. That technique was great for the climate, cool in summer and warm in winter. But when the engineers arrived, they said it was poor. They wanted concrete."

Don Álvaro worked on the construction of the first large shopping center in the area, Monterrey, which opened in 1984. "We didn't know what a mall was. It seemed absurd to us to have stores inside a building, with air conditioning. During breaks, we sat on the rocks of the La Volcana stream, which ran alongside, to eat the lunch we brought in a pot. Now that stream is piped underground and no one remembers it."

Professor Marta, Teacher at the Public School

Professor Marta, 68, taught at the El Poblado School (now Institución Educativa El Poblado) between 1975 and 1995. "My students were children of farmers and bricklayers who worked on the farms of the rich people of Medellín, who came to spend the weekends. The kids arrived with muddy boots, and during recess they played at catching lizards in the schoolyard. There was no gym or synthetic court. The yard was dirt, and when it rained, the kids slipped in the mud. But they were happy."

Marta fondly remembers the community action board meetings, where neighbors decided what to do with the money to fix the streets or bring in the aqueduct. "That community organization was lost. Now everyone lives in their apartment, with their parking spot and private gym. No one sits on the sidewalk to chat anymore. The neighborhood became a giant hotel."

The Arrival of Shopping Malls: When the Mall Killed the Square

The change wasn't gradual; it was an avalanche. In 1984, the Centro Comercial Monterrey opened, which many consider the first modern mall in the city. It was a social event: upper-middle-class families from Medellín went to "window shop," to walk through the air-conditioned hallways and eat in the food court. But for the original residents of El Poblado, Monterrey was the beginning of the end of their world.

In the 90s, the fever broke out. The shopping center El Tesoro arrived, built on an old coffee farm, with its stepped terraces that imitated the hillsides. Then came Santafé in 2004, which rose where there had once been pastures and a country house. And then Oviedo, Premium Plaza, and a dozen more strip centers. Each brought with it towers of apartments, offices, hotels, and an avalanche of traffic that the old residents never imagined.

The original market square of El Poblado couldn't withstand the competition. The mall supermarkets offered packaged products, imported fruits, and fixed prices. The farmers who sold in the square had to leave or starve. Today, the old square is a parking lot, and the few vendors who remain take refuge in the Plaza de Mercado El Poblado, a small covered market near the church, which survives thanks to the loyal weekend clientele.

What was lost wasn't just commerce. It was public life. In the square, you ran into your neighbor, had a coffee with goat's milk, and caught up on the neighborhood gossip. In the mall, you go with a specific purpose, buy, and leave. There's no time for conversation. The mall is efficient, but it's not warm. And El Poblado, which was a warm town, became a transit zone.

Old Maps vs. Current Maps: The Geography of Change

If you manage to get a 1970 map of Medellín and compare it with one from 2026, the contrast is brutal. On the old map, El Poblado is a green patch, with a few lines indicating the village paths. Avenida El Poblado appears as a secondary road, and the Medellín River, which today is a highway, was a real river, with sandy banks and trees.

On the current map, El Poblado is a chessboard: numbered streets, avenues, hillsides full of gated communities with English names (The Gardens, The Point, The Edge). The streams that appeared on the old map as winding blue lines are now underground pipes. The La Poblada stream, which gave the sector its name, is piped under 10th Street. The La Volcana stream, where the children bathed, runs beneath the El Tesoro shopping center.

But not everything is lost. On the 2026 map, you can still see some green remnants: Parque El Poblado, which was the old square; Cerro Nutibara, which resisted as a lung; and the backyards of some old houses that survive in the upper part, near Loma de Los González and Loma del Escobero. Those backyards are the last witnesses to a world that is gone.

A curious fact that almost no one knows: the name "El Poblado" comes from the first settlements of indigenous people and colonists who settled near the river, which the Spaniards called "el poblado de los indios" (the Indian settlement). It wasn't an elegant name; it was a descriptive nickname. And for centuries, the sector was a rural area of passage between Medellín and the south of the Aburrá Valley. Only in the 20th century, with industrialization, did it begin to take shape as an upper-class suburb, first with recreational farms and then with housing developments.

What Was Lost and What Still Remains in the Backyards

Let's be clear: the loss is enormous. The connection to the land was lost. The children of today in El Poblado don't know where milk comes from, they've never seen a live chicken, and they think avocados are born in the supermarket. The vernacular architecture was lost: the bareque houses were almost all demolished. According to an informal inventory by Medellín's Secretary of Culture, fewer than 20 bahareque houses remain in the entire sector, most in a state of deterioration. The silence, the birdsong, and the smell of wet earth were lost. Community life was lost, replaced by condominium life.

But not everything is lost. In the backyards of some old houses —especially in the upper part, in the neighborhoods of El Castillo, Los Naranjos, and La Florida— there are still chickens. Yes, you read that right. There are families that maintain the tradition of raising creole chickens, not to sell, but to have fresh eggs and so the children know what a real animal is. In those same backyards, mango, guava, and avocado trees grow, planted decades ago by the grandparents. And on some corners, still