From the southern tip of the continent, the Andes snake upwards like a sturdy backbone until they reach Colombia and cleave into three branches. Over time, human life and new cities have erupted in its crevices, nestling into rocky breaches and spilling out onto exposed tablelands. Wedged at the bottom of the Aburra Valley, Medellin developed on the banks of the river it is named after. As the country's second largest city modernised and industrialised in the 1950s, the river was channelled and the motorway was built: hordes of cars speeding alongside a waterway that rapidly turned into an open sewer, becoming an unsafe and unwanted strip of land, deepening divisions between the east and the west of the city.
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