What the digital nomad industry did to Medellín

The restaurant I liked in El Poblado in 2019 was called something I couldn't pronounce. Plastic chairs. A woman who refilled your agua without being asked. The menu was laminated and had two things crossed out in pen. It cost about three dollars. I went back last year. It's a smoothie bowl place now. There's a QR code on the table, a Spotify playlist audible from the street, and a host with a clipboard who asked if I had a reservation. For a smoothie bowl. For eleven in the morning.

This is what happened to Medellín. Not the tourists — I want to be precise about this. The tourists are fine. Tourists have always existed and most of them are just people on vacation. What happened is the infrastructure. The co-working café as a genre requires a specific kind of neighborhood: photogenic but not too chaotic, cheap but with reliable fiber, far enough from the airport to feel discovered, close enough to a Rappi delivery zone. Medellín checked every box. So the infrastructure arrived. The "community" language arrived with it. The coworking spaces with the exposed brick and the kombucha on tap and the Notion board visible from the entrance. The English menus with the font that signals authenticity without requiring any. The Instagram wall. The walking tour that ends at a craft beer spot that didn't exist in 2018.

The nomads didn't ruin Medellín. The thing built to attract and retain nomads did. There's a difference and it matters because it changes what you can actually do about it. You can't stop people from showing up. You can stop building smoothie bowl infrastructure on top of a city that had its own thing going. Nobody asked the plastic-chair restaurant what it wanted to become.