Medellín Travel Spanish: Hear Vos, Read Tú

By the Audaz Revista editorial team

Updated September 23, 2026 · Reviewed by the Audaz editorial team

Medellín has a reputation. In 2016 it won the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, a Singapore government award. The prize page says the city transformed itself “from a notoriously violent city to one that is being held up as a model for urban innovation within a span of just two decades.”

Its Spanish has a reputation too. Every guide says the same thing. Paisas say vos. We read 13 of the pages that rank for Medellín travel Spanish, 49,270 words of them. One of them, Medellín.guide, says tú is “used in Medellín, but less common than vos or usted”.

That is true when people talk. We wanted to know what a visitor actually reads. None of the 13 guides checked. So we did.

What does Medellín write to visitors?

We listed 39 places a visitor meets. The Metro, the bus terminals, the bike share, the botanical garden, the big museums, the utility company, the local banks and brands, two universities and the city’s news outlets.

We read each home page and up to three help, contact or visitor pages. 25 sites could be read as text. That gave us 89 pages and 156,422 words. The other 14 blocked automated reading, so they are not in the count. We name them in the sources.

Then we counted commands, because a command has to pick a pronoun. Regístrate is tú. Registrate is vos. Regístrese is usted. One button cannot be all three.

That is 136 commands using tú, 9 using usted and none using vos. We also searched for the everyday vos verbs, like tenés, podés, querés and sos. There were none in 156,422 words.

The Metro’s visitor page is typical. It says: Encuentra en esta sección todas las herramientas necesarias para que tu viaje sea el mejor. (Find everything you need in this section to make your trip the best it can be.) That is tú, from the company that runs the city’s trains.

The bike share does the same. Con EnCicla, tienes acceso gratuito a bicicletas públicas. (With EnCicla, you get free access to public bikes.) A paisa friend would say tenés. The website says tienes.

So is vos in Medellín a myth?

No. It is very real, and the best sources agree. The Real Academia Española says Colombia mixes tú and vos, with vos “predominante en Antioquia y toda la franja occidental situada entre el Pacífico y el río Cauca”. Antioquia is Medellín’s region.

The RAE also notes something unusual about western Colombia. In Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and most of Colombia and Venezuela, it says educated speech prefers tú and vos lacks prestige. Western Colombia is one of only two named exceptions.

Here is the part we enjoyed most. The Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, a Medellín university, has a blog post on vos. It says: “Se podría decir que es en Antioquia y en su capital Medellín, en donde el voseo está más presente y vivo que en el resto del territorio colombiano.” (You could say Antioquia and its capital Medellín are where vos is most present and alive in Colombia.)

We read that same university’s website for our count. It used 18 tú commands, like Inscríbete and Escríbenos. It used no vos at all.

Our read: vos is how Medellín talks. Tú is how Medellín writes. Both are local. If you only learn one, learn to read tú and to recognise vos when you hear it.

One caution. We read websites. A 2022 study we cite below notes that researchers have found vos in Medellín’s advertising campaigns. Street ads and billboards may be warmer than web copy. Our count does not cover them.

Where does usted survive in Medellín’s writing?

We read all 9 usted commands in context. Six of them are the same word, Contáctenos, used as a menu label. It appears on Plaza Mayor, Grupo Éxito, the city’s urban development agency and El Colombiano.

The other three are small. EnCicla’s accessibility note says por favor contáctenos. Telemedellín ends a news story with Síganos en nuestro canal de difusión en Whatsapp. A university library page says Entérese de las condiciones de préstamo.

We removed two hits that only looked like usted. A library line said the staff will “lo contacte y haga entrega”, which is a third person verb. And the Metro mentions a form called “Contáctenos” by name. Neither one is speaking to you.

Why do paisas say usted to their own family?

This is the part of paisa Spanish that confuses visitors most. You will hear a mother say usted to her son. You will hear old friends say it to each other. In most places, usted is for strangers.

Two researchers at the Universidad de Antioquia, Ana Isabel García Tesoro and Ji Son Jang, studied this. They surveyed Medellín residents aged 18 to 85, all born to Antioquian parents. They asked a simple question. Can usted ever sound as warm and close as vos or tú?

Of the 849 people in their main table, 92% said no. The answer barely moved by social class or sex. It did move with age. 6% of people aged 18 to 25 said yes. Among people aged 76 to 81, 30% did.

So paisa usted between family is not a cuddle. The authors say it “mantiene una connotación de respeto y de distanciamiento”, a sense of respect and distance. People use it toward parents out of respect, out of habit, or as part of who they are.

For a visitor, that is useful. If a shop owner calls you usted, that is normal politeness. If your host calls her own mother usted, nothing is wrong. Our guide to tú vs usted covers the general rule.

What words will you read on the Metro and around town?

These are the words the city’s own transport, park and museum sites use. We counted them across nine visitor-facing sites. Cívica alone appears 109 times, and Cultura Metro 28 times.

Parque Arví’s directions show how these words fit together. Para acceder vía Metrocable, debes desplazarte desde cualquier estación del Metro hasta la estación Acevedo en el norte de la ciudad. From there you take Línea K to Santo Domingo, donde haces transbordo a la Línea L del Cable Arví.

Read that once and you know how to reach the park. It is also all tú: debes, haces.

PQRS is worth a note. The bus terminal site spells it out as peticiones, quejas, reclamos, sugerencias y/o denuncias. It is how you send a request or a complaint. The letters appeared on 13 of the 25 sites we read.

What will you hear on the street?

The slang guides disagree on a lot, but a few words turn up again and again. We checked which ones appear across the 13 ranking pages we read.

You do not need to say any of these. You do need to recognise them. A la orden is what staff say when they offer to help. No dar papaya is the one worth taking to heart.

Our wider list of Spanish slang covers other countries. For how Colombian Spanish sounds, see our piece on why Bogotá Spanish is called the clearest.

Should you use vos in Medellín as a visitor?

Only if it comes naturally. Vos in Medellín is for friends and people your own age. Using it with a stranger or someone older can sound too familiar.

The safe choice is usted with strangers and tú once people are relaxed with you. That is what the city itself writes. Nobody will think it is odd.

If you want to understand vos when you hear it, the verb forms are the same ones Argentina uses: vos tenés, vos podés, vos sos. Our guide to vos covers them.

What should you do before your trip to Medellín?

Our read: most Medellín guides teach you to speak like a paisa. That is fun, but it is the harder half. The easier half is reading the city, and the city reads like standard Latin American tú. Learn that first, and you will get around from day one.

Frequently asked questions

For the bigger picture on accents and regions, see our comparison of Latin American and Spain Spanish, or our Spanish phrase guide for travel. Everything else is on the Audaz Revista home page.

In a hurry? We also made a seven slide web story version of this piece, with the count and the Metro words.

Sources

• Audaz corpus, 23 September 2026: 39 Medellín websites attempted, 25 read, 89 pages, 156,422 words. Not readable by automated fetch, so not counted: Alcaldía de Medellín, Gobernación de Antioquia, José María Córdova airport, Medellín Convention Bureau, Parque Explora, Biblioteca Pública Piloto, Comfenalco Antioquia, Tigo, Grupo Nutresa, Sura, Crem Helado, Protección, Universidad EAFIT and Teleantioquia. Counts, rulings and saved pages are held by our editorial team.
• Real Academia Española and ASALE, Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (2005), entry voseo, sections 2.3.4 and 2.4.1.
• Ana Isabel García Tesoro and Ji Son Jang, “Consideraciones acerca de la noción de ‘usted’ de solidaridad en el español hablado en Medellín (Colombia)”, Revista Signos 55(108), 2022, doi 10.4067/S0718-09342022000100212.
• Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, ¿Qué es el voseo y cómo se usa en Colombia?, 6 September 2021.
• Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize, 2016 Prize Laureate: Medellín.
• Audaz SERP read, 23 September 2026: 14 pages ranking for Medellín travel Spanish, 13 read in full, 49,270 words.