61 of 69 Murals Were Reported Covered: What Is Happening to Comuna 13’s Graffiti in 2026?

The number that changed the conversation

In July 2026, El Colombiano reported that 61 of 69 murals identified along the principal tourist route were fully or partially covered. Medellín’s city council had raised a similar concern in April, saying only a small minority of the identified works remained fully visible.

Why this is happening

The corridor now supports shops, food stands, bars, rooftops, souvenir sellers and other tourism businesses. Structures, merchandise and signage can physically block murals. The same tourist demand that created income around street art can therefore reduce the visibility of the art itself.

This is not simply “tourists versus locals”

Many businesses are locally owned and tourism has created livelihoods. The conflict is about land use, public space, route management and cultural priorities inside a dense residential neighborhood. A simplistic anti-tourism argument misses the fact that residents have different interests too.

What local institutions are trying to solve

The 2026 council debate included calls for stronger planning, registration, public-space management, security and protection of artistic heritage. El Colombiano also reported community efforts to organize tourism and recover more of the Graffitour’s original cultural purpose.

What a visitor can do

Choose smaller groups, avoid blocking residents, buy from local businesses without treating every stop as mandatory, and prioritize guides who actually discuss the art and its authors. Most importantly, do not assume that spending more automatically equals supporting culture. Ask where the money goes.

Field notes and deeper context

Why the denominator matters The 61-of-69 figure refers to a particular inventory of murals associated with the tourist route; it does not mean Comuna 13 contains only 69 murals. That distinction should stay explicit whenever the number is repeated. Otherwise a useful indicator of heritage pressure turns into a misleading claim about the entire neighborhood’s art. What to watch next The meaningful follow-up is whether city and community responses actually improve visibility and route management. Future updates should track which murals are recovered, whether new regulations alter signage or vendor placement, and whether artists gain protected or designated surfaces. A 2026 article becomes much more valuable if it is updated with outcomes instead of freezing the controversy at the moment it made headlines.

What the 61-of-69 figure actually tells us

The headline number is useful because it makes a visual problem measurable. In April 2026, a Medellín City Council debate cited 69 identified murals along the Graffitour corridor and said 61 were covered or deteriorated. In July, El Colombiano reported the same 61-of-69 figure and described the works as totally or partially blocked by commercial activity. The council also cited an effective carrying capacity of 667 visitors a day while actual flows were measured in the thousands. Those are not small discrepancies; they describe a tourism district that grew much faster than its original public-space design.

But “covered” needs interpretation. It does not necessarily mean that somebody painted a mural black or destroyed it. A work can become hard to see because a kiosk, awning, sign, merchandise rack, restaurant seating area or new facade occupies the sight line. It can also be repainted, weathered or physically altered as the wall itself changes. That distinction matters because the policy response to vandalism is different from the response to overcrowded commerce or changing property use.

The figure also should not be turned into a claim that 88 percent of all street art in Comuna 13 has disappeared. The 69 works refer to an identified set associated with the main tourist route, not every mural, tag, piece, painted shutter or community art project across the whole comuna. Comuna 13 is much larger than the escalator corridor.

How a cultural route becomes a commercial corridor

The Graffitour did not begin as a conventional attraction designed by a tourism authority. Casa Kolacho describes its origins in the walking narratives developed by Jeihhco and Perro Graff around 2011, when they used hip-hop, graffiti and oral history to talk about conflict and transformation. The electric escalators, opened in 2011, later made Las Independencias dramatically easier to traverse and helped concentrate visitors around a relatively narrow pedestrian spine.

That concentration created an obvious market. A resident with a frontage along the route could sell drinks, souvenirs, food, art or an experience to thousands of people passing a few meters from the door. As that commerce multiplied, the route became economically valuable in a way it had never been before. The same walls that functioned as canvases also became storefronts, backdrops, signs and rentable commercial surfaces.

There is no need to romanticize poverty to see the tension. Local commerce can be a genuine benefit of tourism, and many residents have built livelihoods from it. The problem described in the 2026 debate is not “people are making money.” It is that economic growth, pedestrian capacity, cultural preservation, guide quality, waste, mobility and use of public space have not been governed as one system.

The carrying-capacity problem is bigger than art

The City Council debate is especially useful because it connects the mural issue to crowding. Officials and council members cited visitor counts ranging from more than 8,000 to as high as 10,000 people on busy days, while the tourism secretary referred to an effective carrying capacity of 667 visitors daily. Different methodologies may produce different numbers, but every cited figure points in the same direction: the core corridor can be saturated.

That affects how art is experienced. A mural that could be read from across a small plaza may now be viewed through a moving crowd. A guide trying to discuss an artist or a historical event may be competing with music, vendors, other tour groups and queues for photos. Visitors respond by moving faster and concentrating on the most photogenic fragments. The cultural product then changes from a narrated neighborhood history into a sequence of high-throughput visual stops.

Crowding also changes what gets painted. A highly visible wall on a dense route becomes a valuable attention surface. The incentives can shift toward images that function immediately in a photograph, branded backdrops or frequently refreshed work. None of those forms is inherently illegitimate, but the mix can gradually displace quieter memorial work, writer-driven graffiti or pieces whose value depends on explanation.

What “recovering the essence” could mean without freezing the neighborhood

Preservation does not require turning Comuna 13 into a museum where nothing changes. Graffiti and muralism are often temporary by nature, and artists themselves repaint walls. A sensible cultural policy would distinguish between ordinary rotation and the loss of documented works through unmanaged obstruction.

One approach is documentation: maintain a public inventory with artist, date, wall, theme, photographs and status. Another is visibility agreements for selected works with unusual historical or community value. A third is to create more legal, well-prepared surfaces so new work does not depend entirely on the already congested escalator spine. Medellín’s 2025–26 Latidos biennial shows that the city is already thinking about graffiti and urban art as a professional field requiring curation, technical support and maintenance.

The most difficult step is governance. The 2026 council discussion repeatedly returned to the absence of a single authority coordinating tourism, culture, mobility, public space and local commerce. Murals are the visible symptom of that fragmentation.

How to see the issue for yourself on a visit

Do not treat the 61-of-69 statistic as a scavenger hunt. Instead, look at the relationship between art and the route. Notice which works have a clear viewing distance and which are visible only in fragments. Look for signatures or plaques that are hidden behind merchandise. Compare older photographs shown by guides with the current wall. Ask whether a piece was intentionally repainted, covered by a business, or simply replaced through normal artistic rotation.

Then leave the most crowded stretch for a few minutes. The contrast between the core escalator corridor and quieter side streets makes the planning issue easier to understand. Comuna 13 still contains homes, schools, community spaces and ordinary neighborhood streets that are not tourism stages. Seeing that larger geography is part of understanding why residents can simultaneously value tourism and worry about what uncontrolled growth does to the place.