The history of Medellín dates back to the XVII Century when the inhabitants of the Aburrá Valley, lead by plantation owners in turn miners and traders, conducted the negotiations leading to the erection of the New Villa at the site of Ana, as the Santa Elena gully was known.

The founding of this Villa responded to the policies of the Spanish Crown to create cities, which coincided with the interests of its inhabitants seeking greater autonomy to leave their lives and decide on the complexity of city life and the future of the new generations, according to their projects and needs.  Therefore, the town council of Santa Fe de Antioquia – the provincial capital – was against the new city.

The valley where Medellín is located today was first seen by the Spaniards in August 1541.  They were on an expedition led by Jerónimo Luis Téjelo, who obeyed the orders of Marshal Jorge Robledo, in search of land and gold riches.

Inhabited by indigenous people of different characters (Yamesíes, Niquías, Nutabes and Aburraes, according to the chronicles), the valley was conducive to the Iberian settlers, headed by Francisco Herrera y Campuzano, to found the population of San Lorenzo de Aburrá on March 2,1616, on the site now occupied by the Poblado Park.  A Royal Charter of Queen Mariana of Austria, in 1674, gave it the title of Villa and on November 2, 1675, the Villa of Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria of Medellín was established.

The Medellín town council defended the interests of the Medellín and the Villa trade against the jealousy of Santa Fe de Antioquia; it regulated the circulation of money, the Sunday market, the grocer shops, the cleanliness and decoration of the Villa, the layout of streets and other aspects of healthy coexistence, which consolidated Medellín as the principal commercial city of the Antioquia province.  Thanks to this process, the New Villa became the capital of Antioquia in 1826.

Presence

Throughout all of the XIX Century, the political, social and economic life of the country had a protagonist in this region.

From the 1920s and 1930s, when all its merchandise entered and left on the Cisneros Railroad and the Magdalena River, the city was the main industrial center of the country.

It was famous in North America and Europe for Café Medellín, distributed by the American Coffee Corporation.

The conditions of the land, the delicate manner in which the coffee was cultivated and benefited, the labor of choosing and cleaning the beans – techniques applied by the Antioqueñan cultivators – made this the smoothest coffee known in the world.

Character

It has been said that its inhabitants inherited the entrepreneur character of these early settlers who, faced with a mountainous topography, had to work vigorously to fulfill the businesses proposed.

This makes everything that the Antioqueñan projects have large dimensions.  The search for communication with the outside world, for example, led to important engineering projects that still produce admiration and recognition among the inhabitants and visitors.

Medellín is vibrant, vital and booming, with a large, intense commercial, industrial, cultural, religious, social and sporting activity.  But, at the same time, it conserves a certain air of the simple, family life of the towns that make up the Department.