Last week, I got a message from a viewer named Gus.

No explanation.
No commentary.
No “hey Matt, thought you’d find this interesting.”
Just a link.

Which, honestly, feels like one of the most efficient things a man from Texas can do.

So I clicked it.

And then I read it.
And then I read it again.

Because Time Out — one of the most respected travel publications on the planet — released its list of the 50 best cities in the world for 2026. Not “best beach towns.” Not “best hidden gems.” Not “places influencers are pretending to discover for the first time.” The best cities. Period.

They surveyed 24,000 people across 150 cities, layered that with insight from more than a hundred city experts, and built a ranking that has been running for a decade.

This is not some random blog ranking places based on vibes and drone footage.

This is a serious list.

And on that list, Colombia got two cities.

Medellín at number 35.
Bogotá at number 50.

Let that sit for a second.

On the same list as cities like London, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Singapore, Copenhagen, Zurich, Berlin.

That’s the company Colombia is keeping now.

And if you’ve spent any time hearing people back home talk about Colombia like it’s still frozen in the worst stereotypes of the 1990s, this should hit a little differently.

Because this is not just a flattering travel mention.
This is not just tourism copy.
And it’s definitely not about bragging rights for the sake of bragging rights.

This is about what it means when a country that the world had once more or less written off forces its way back into the conversation — not with PR spin, not with a slogan, but by actually changing.

That’s why this matters.

And to really understand why those two little numbers — 35 and 50 — are more important than they look, you have to understand what Colombia used to mean to the outside world.

Because thirty years ago, Colombia wasn’t appearing on lists like this.

It was appearing on very different ones.

Let’s go back.

Not for drama.
For context.

Because when people see a list like this today, it’s easy to treat it like a simple travel story.

Nice. Medellín made it. Bogotá made it. Good for them.

But that reading misses the real significance.

Go back to Medellín in 1991.

At that point, the city had become statistically the most dangerous city on Earth. Not one of the most dangerous. The most dangerous.

Its homicide rate hit 381 murders per 100,000 residents.

For perspective, a city is generally considered to have a very serious violence problem when that figure climbs above 50. New York City, at its most dangerous point in the early 1990s, peaked around 30.

Medellín was at 381.

That is not a bad stretch.
That is civilizational trauma.

And of course, hanging over all of that was the name the entire world attached to Colombia at the time: Pablo Escobar.

I’m not going to give him more airtime than he’s already gotten. Netflix has already done enough of that for all of us.

But I do want to make one thing clear: the damage done in that era was not just physical.

It was reputational.

Colombia became shorthand for something in the global imagination.

And it wasn’t beauty.
It wasn’t mountain cities.
It wasn’t vibrant culture.
It wasn’t food, music, creativity, resilience, or warmth.

It was drugs.
Cartels.
Violence.
Danger.

That image stuck hard.

Through the 1990s.
Through the 2000s.
Through years of travel warnings, reduced routes, weak tourism, hesitant investment, and that familiar reaction from people in the U.S. or Europe when you told them you were thinking about going to Colombia:

Why would you do that?

That was the atmosphere.

Not uncertainty.
Judgment.

The world didn’t just ignore Colombia.
It decided it understood Colombia.

And then it moved on.

Because Colombia did something that a lot of places never quite pull off.

It changed the trajectory.

Not quickly.
Not cleanly.
Not without pain.

But it changed it.

Escobar was killed in 1993. The cartel system fractured. The Colombian government, with major U.S. support, started taking back territory. The country did not transform overnight. There were setbacks. There was violence. There was real suffering and real cost along the way.

But the arc shifted.

And Medellín, in particular, became one of the most extraordinary urban transformation stories in the modern world.

That’s not exaggerated language.

That’s the truth.

Because what happened there was not just a security operation. It was not just a law-enforcement story. It was not just “crime went down.”

The city made a much deeper decision.

It decided to invest in itself differently.

Not just in the areas tourists might see.
Not just in the wealthy neighborhoods.
Not just in the parts of the city that were already easy to sell.

It invested in places that had been physically and socially cut off from the rest of the urban fabric.

The comunas.
The hillside neighborhoods.
The areas that had been neglected, isolated, and in many cases consumed by violence.

And instead of treating those communities as permanent damage zones, Medellín started integrating them.

Cable cars.
Libraries.
Parks.
Public spaces.
Escalators built into the hillsides.
Infrastructure that was not symbolic, but connective.

This matters, because it reflects a much deeper philosophy of urban change.

You do not transform a city only by protecting the already-protected.
You transform it by widening access to the city itself.

And nowhere is that story more visible than in Comuna 13.

If you know Medellín’s story at all, you know Comuna 13.

In 2002, it was the site of one of the most intense military operations in the city’s history — a brutal attempt to retake the area from armed groups operating there.

Today, it is one of the most visited places in all of South America.

Murals.
Escalators.
Street art.
Guided tours.
Music.
Dancers.
Coffee.
Viewpoints.
Vendors.
Life.

Same hillside.
Different century.

And if that doesn’t say something profound about urban resilience, I don’t know what does.

Because what happened in Medellín is not just that the city “cleaned up.”

That phrase is too thin for what actually took place.

The city rewrote its relationship to itself.

It built infrastructure over old assumptions.
Culture over fear.
Connectivity over abandonment.

So when Time Out puts Medellín at number 35 in the world, that is not some cute travel-magazine redemption arc.

That is the world finally catching up to a story the city has already been writing for years.

This is important.

Because sometimes when a place has a dramatic history, people assume any praise it gets is partly sentimental.

Like the world is rewarding the effort more than the actual result.

That is not what happened here.

Time Out did not put Medellín on the list because it has a tragic past and a nice message.

They put it there because the city is delivering in the present.

They described Medellín as a “bona fide travel hotspot.”

That phrase matters.

Not “interesting comeback city.”
Not “worth reconsidering.”
Not “surprisingly okay now.”

A bona fide travel hotspot.

That’s a serious statement.

And when you look at what they highlighted, it makes sense.

The nightlife in Provenza.
The energy.
The food scene.
The cultural confidence.
The transformation of Perpetuo Socorro, a formerly industrial district that’s evolving into one of the city’s most creative areas.
The way Medellín keeps producing new layers of relevance rather than just relying on the old “eternal spring” narrative.

Even the future-facing ambition matters.

The city is building Marinilla-style beach infrastructure near the airport — a landlocked city effectively deciding, in very Medellín fashion, that if it wants a beach, it will just go ahead and build one.

That’s not subtle energy.
That’s swinging-for-the-fences energy.

And honestly, that tracks.

Because what strikes me every time I spend real time in Medellín is not just that it feels safer or more beautiful than outsiders expect.

It feels alive.

Not in a sanitized way.
Not in a “wow, they fixed it” way.

Alive in the sense that the city knows exactly how hard it fought to become what it is, and it has absolutely no interest in apologizing for enjoying that fact.

There is pride there.
Real pride.

And it’s earned.

Now let’s talk about Bogotá.

Because Medellín tends to get the transformation narrative.
Cartagena gets the postcard treatment.
The coffee region gets the soft-focus Instagram treatment.

Bogotá is harder to sell in one sentence.

It’s a city of roughly ten million people sitting 8,600 feet above sea level.
It’s loud.
It’s sprawling.
It’s messy.
The traffic will teach you humility in real time.

And if you arrive expecting a polished, easy-love city, Bogotá may ask you to recalibrate.

I say that as someone who chose to live here.

I love Bogotá.

But I also understand why it takes some people a minute.

Because Bogotá is not a city that always seduces immediately.

It rewards attention.

That is a different thing.

It’s not trying to impress you in the first ten minutes.
It’s revealing itself in layers.

And once you start paying attention, you realize how much is here.

The food scene alone is incredible.
Not “good for South America.”
Not “surprisingly good.”
World class.

I’ll happily die on that hill.

Neighborhoods like Usaquén, Chapinero, Zona T, and La Macarena have restaurant density and quality that can absolutely hold their own in serious global-city conversations.

Then there’s the art.
The street art.
The museums.
The intellectual life.
The cultural texture.
The sheer scale of the city’s creative output.

And then there’s one of the things that still blows my mind: Ciclovía.

Every Sunday, Bogotá closes over 75 miles of roads to cars and hands them back to people.

Cyclists.
Runners.
Families.
Walkers.
Street life.
Movement.

In a city of that size, that is not a cute civic gesture.

That is a philosophy.

That says something about what kind of city Bogotá wants to be.

And it matters.

Because cities are not just ranked on aesthetics.
They’re ranked on how they feel to live in.
How people connect to them.
How they use them.
Whether they produce belonging, vitality, and actual urban life.

Bogotá does that.

Not always neatly.
Not always softly.
But absolutely.

So yes, number 50 might sound like the last seat at the table.

It isn’t.

There were 150 cities in the evaluation.
A hundred of them didn’t make the cut at all.

Bogotá did.

And it did so while still fighting a reputation battle the city has been carrying for decades.

That matters.

That’s the deeper point.

Because yes, the ranking is exciting.
Yes, the placement is notable.
Yes, it’s fun to see Colombian cities holding space on a list that includes places with global reputations built over centuries.

But the real story here is not the list itself.

It’s what the list reveals.

Thirty years ago, Colombia was not seen as an urban success story.
It was a cautionary tale.

The world didn’t just overlook it.
It made a judgment and moved on.

And Colombia spent the next generation proving that judgment incomplete.

Not with a rebrand.
Not with slogans.
Not by hiding the past under a prettier filter.

By building.

By investing.
By changing.
By connecting neighborhoods.
By creating public space.
By developing culture.
By attracting new people.
By shifting expectations one lived experience at a time.

That’s what makes this so powerful.

Because cities like Zurich, Copenhagen, Singapore, and London inherited reputations built over long stretches of wealth, infrastructure, and global confidence.

Colombia didn’t get that runway.

Its major cities had to fight their way back into legitimacy under very different conditions.

And they did.

That deserves more respect than people sometimes realize.

This is the part I keep thinking about.

Because for people who’ve moved to Colombia — or are considering it, or are trying to explain it to skeptical family back home — this list is useful for a reason beyond bragging.

It gives language to something many people living here already feel.

You did not move to some frozen stereotype.

You moved into the middle of one of the most remarkable national and urban reinventions of the modern era.

You got here while the story is still unfolding.

That’s different from moving to a place whose reputation has been stable and settled for generations.

Colombia still has motion in it.
Still has argument in it.
Still has friction, ambition, experimentation, pride, and redefinition happening in real time.

And that makes living here especially interesting.

Because the country is not done becoming.

So yes, Time Out put Medellín at number 35 and Bogotá at number 50 on its list of the 50 best cities in the world for 2026.

That’s the headline.

But the real meaning is bigger than the ranking.

It means the world is finally seeing something that Colombia has been building for a long time.

It means the gap between global perception and lived reality is getting smaller.

It means that a country once known internationally for fear and failure is now producing cities that belong in serious conversations about urban life, culture, energy, food, creativity, and human experience.

And maybe most importantly, it means that Colombia did not just survive its worst era.

It outgrew the story the world handed it.

That’s not a minor achievement.

That’s extraordinary.

And if you’ve been here — in Bogotá, in Medellín, anywhere in Colombia really — you probably know exactly what I mean.

Because the real Colombian story has always been easier to understand once you stop looking at the old headlines and start looking around.