The Original Graffitour: How Comuna 13’s Street-Art Tour Actually Began

The story starts before mass tourism

Casa Kolacho dates the roots of the Graffitour to around 2011. Its account says rapper and cultural leader Jeihhco Castaño and graffiti artist Perro Graff began walking Comuna 13 with visitors to talk about conflict, culture and transformation. These early walks were small, often connected to universities and did not operate like today’s fixed-price tour market.

The escalators changed the geography of visiting

Outdoor escalators were delivered to Las Independencias in 2012, replacing a climb of roughly 350 steps according to Casa Kolacho’s history. The infrastructure made movement easier for residents and, over time, created a highly legible route for visitors. Retaining walls became canvases and the route became economically important.

Graffiti was part of a larger hip-hop ecosystem

Casa Kolacho places the tour inside a longer culture of rap, graffiti, dance, festivals and youth training that had developed after the violence of 2002. That matters because the Graffitour was never simply an architecture tour with colorful walls added later. The interpretation came from people already using hip-hop as organization, expression and memory.

Why the origin story matters in 2026

The tourist product is now much bigger than its founders. Medellín’s 2026 council debate explicitly raised concerns that saturation and uncontrolled commercial growth are putting the Graffitour’s identity and artistic heritage at risk. Knowing the origin helps visitors distinguish the cultural practice from the tourism industry built around it.

What to do with this as a visitor

You do not have to book the original operator to respect the origin. Read Casa Kolacho’s account, choose a guide who can explain the neighborhood rather than just lead a photo route, and remember that the word “Graffitour” carries a specific local history.

Field notes and deeper context

What changed when the walk became an industry Early Graffitour storytelling did not need to solve problems like thousands of daily visitors, online booking platforms, bilingual scheduling, group control, rooftop stops or souvenir commerce. Modern tours do. Professionalization brought real benefits: easier access, more jobs, stronger booking protections and a path for many residents to monetize local knowledge. It also created incentives to shorten complicated history into repeatable scripts. Understanding both sides is more useful than romanticizing the pre-tourism era. A useful test for modern Graffitours Ask what would remain if the murals vanished tomorrow. A culture-first tour would still have something substantial to teach about hip-hop, neighborhood formation, violence, infrastructure, memory and local organizing. A purely visual tour would lose almost everything. That test helps explain why the original model matters: the walls were a way into a story, not the entire story.

Before the tour, there was already a hip-hop infrastructure

Casa Kolacho traces the cultural groundwork back to the years after the 2002 military operations, when hip-hop artists and organizers developed festivals, training schools and cultural organizations. This matters because the Graffitour did not invent culture in Comuna 13. It created a way for outsiders to encounter cultural work that was already happening.

Rap, graffiti, breakdance and DJ culture provided tools for youth formation, expression and public narrative. When Jeihhco and Perro Graff began walking visitors through the neighborhood around 2011, they were drawing on that ecosystem.

The early walk was not designed as mass tourism

Casa Kolacho describes the original walks as academic, often connected to universities, without a fixed charge and far less massive than the current route. The purpose was to talk about conflict, culture and transformation at a time when those narratives were not widely represented in Medellín’s visitor economy.

This origin explains why “Graffitour” originally meant more than seeing graffiti. The wall was an entry point into political, historical and cultural conversation.

The electric escalators changed accessibility and visibility

The Las Independencias escalators began operation in 2011 and were inaugurated that December. Official Medellín accounts say they replaced a climb equivalent to more than 350 steps and reduced the journey to a few minutes. They were transportation infrastructure first.

Their tourism effect came later. By making a steep hillside route easier to traverse, the escalators brought more outsiders through a concentrated area. Retaining walls and public structures around the route became highly visible surfaces. Art, infrastructure and mobility started reinforcing one another.

Tourism changed what the Graffitour could finance

Growing visitor demand created income for guides, food sellers, artists, performers, shops, rooftop venues and transport providers. Cultural organizations could monetize experiences and, in some cases, direct resources back into training or community projects.

That is a real achievement. It also created incentives for imitation. Once “Comuna 13 Graffitour” became a globally recognizable product, operators with very different levels of local connection could sell versions of it.

The word “original” now needs careful use

Many tour listings describe themselves as authentic, local or original. Those words are marketing claims unless they are tied to a specific organization and history. Casa Kolacho identifies itself as a co-founder of the experience and documents Jeihhco and Perro Graff’s early walks.

A current tour can still be excellent without being run by the founders. The important thing is to distinguish lineage from quality. “Original” tells you about historical connection; it does not automatically settle whether a particular departure time, guide or route is the best fit for you.

2026 makes the origin story newly relevant

The Medellín City Council’s 2026 debate repeatedly raised concerns that the Graffitour had become over-commercialized and disconnected from its cultural essence. Officials cited extreme crowding, mural obstruction, unregulated commerce and weak guide formalization.

That does not mean the solution is to recreate 2011. The neighborhood’s economy has changed. The useful question is which elements of the original model remain worth protecting: artist attribution, memory, hip-hop, local narrative, community benefit and a route that treats residents as more than scenery.

The story is larger than two founders

Jeihhco and Perro Graff are important to the origin story, but they are not the whole story. Cultural collectives, victims’ organizations, residents, public agencies, performers, artists and businesses all shaped what came next. The escalators were a public infrastructure project. Murals involved many creators. Tourism growth depended on thousands of visitors and hundreds of local economic actors.

Avoid the startup-style myth in which two people “created” an entire neighborhood transformation. The more accurate story is that they helped create a specific narrative and walking practice within a much larger social process.

What an historically grounded tour feels like

It should name artists. It should explain why hip-hop matters. It should distinguish the escalators’ mobility purpose from the later tourism boom. It should talk about conflict without narcotrafficking spectacle. It should show some evidence of local cultural work beyond commerce.

Most importantly, it should make you understand why the Graffitour was a method of telling a story, not simply a path between photo spots.

A timeline worth remembering

The sequence is more useful than a single founding date: cultural and hip-hop organizing intensified after the violence of the early 2000s; Jeihhco and Perro Graff began early walks around 2011; the public escalators opened in 2011 and altered access to Las Independencias; the route became increasingly visual and commercial as visitor numbers grew; and by 2026 Medellín was publicly debating crowding, cultural preservation and governance.

That timeline makes it harder to tell a simplistic story in which the escalators “created” the Graffitour or graffiti “saved” the neighborhood overnight. Transformation accumulated through different actors and institutions over years.