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Hacienda Napoles, once owned by Pablo Escobar, is a theme park in Colombia featuring his former estate, including a private zoo with wild hippos. The park has been criticized for glorifying a drug lord, but provides jobs and educational exhibits about his crimes. Refugee families have settled on the site.
Hacienda Napoles is a sprawling estate that once belonged to Pablo Escobar, one of the most feared members of Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel. The estate encompasses an area roughly nine times the size of Central Park, including a Spanish Colonial-style mansion, an assortment of other residences, and the remains of Escobar’s private playground. In 2007, Hacienda Napoles opened as a theme park, catering to curious visitors who had been rummaging around the site for years.
Until Escobar’s death in 1993, Hacienda Napoles was his headquarters and very few people set foot on the land. Escobar maintained a variety of on-site amenities, including an airstrip and large private swimming pool, but the estate’s most notable feature was probably his own private zoo, stocked with an assortment of exotic animals.
When Escobar died, his family claimed the property, but it was confiscated by the Colombian government and placed in the care of the nearby town of Puerto Triunfo. Most of the zoo’s animals were exported to other zoos around the world so they could receive proper care, but the hippos were left behind. The hippos have made Hacienda Napoles famous; although Escobar only imported four, at least 18 were counted at the site by 2003 and had gone wild.
Because hippos can be extremely aggressive and very territorial, questions have been raised about how hippos could be successfully captured and exported, and there has been much debate about what to do with them. As of 2008, the hippos of Hacienda Napoles were still roaming the site along with visitors, who poked their way through the rapidly disintegrating mansion, admired the life-size sculptures of battling dinosaurs, and played on the land that had once inspired so much fear. Some critics have suggested that glorifying a drug lord by turning his private property into a theme park is a bit tacky, but City says the site provides the necessary jobs and that the park includes educational exhibits about Escobar’s crimes. to reinforce the idea that he was a criminal.
Several refugee families have also settled at Hacienda Napoles, in various abandoned structures on the site. When Hacienda Napoles was turned into a theme park, refugee families should in theory have moved into more appropriate lodgings, although some commentators have pointed out that there was a certain irony in welcoming victims of Colombia’s war on drugs on the estate of a former drug lord.
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