I Found an Apartment in Medellin Without Speaking Spanish. Here Is Exactly How.
I arrived in Medellin with about forty words of Spanish. Hola. Gracias. Donde esta el bano. That was my entire toolkit. I needed a furnished apartment in a safe neighborhood within a week, and I did not have a single local contact to help me.
I found one in Laureles. Six hundred dollars a month, furnished, fast WiFi, and close enough to walk to a half dozen coworking spaces and cafes. This is what worked for me.
Before you land: join the Facebook groups
This is the move that made everything else possible. Search “Medellin Expats” and “Medellin Digital Nomads” on Facebook. Join both. Spend fifteen minutes scrolling through the housing posts. You will see the price ranges people actually pay, the neighborhoods that keep getting mentioned, and the names of landlords who post over and over.
These groups are where the deals live that never touch Airbnb or any booking platform. Owners who want foreign tenants but do not want to hand 15 to 20 percent to a platform post their apartments here instead.
Post your own ad before you get on the plane. Keep it short: “Remote worker, quiet, looking for furnished 1BR in Laureles or El Poblado, $500 to $800, move-in [date].” I got eight responses within a day of posting mine. Half were from landlords, half from people whose friends were moving out.
Pick your neighborhood
If you speak zero Spanish, start in El Poblado or Laureles. Those are your two options. I would not complicate it further on a first stay.
El Poblado is the default nomad hub. English is widely spoken. It is also the most expensive neighborhood in the city. Laureles is quieter, cheaper, and the expat community has been growing fast. It is also flat and walkable, which sounds minor until you spend a week walking up Medellin hills in the heat.
Here is what furnished one-bedrooms actually cost as of mid-2026: El Poblado runs $700 to $1,200 a month. Laureles runs $540 to $850 a month. The difference is real money. It will cover your Spanish lessons and your groceries.
I would not rent in Envigado, Sabaneta, or Belen on your first stay. Those neighborhoods are good values and I like them, but you need basic Spanish to communicate with landlords and neighbors. Save them for your second or third trip, once you know the city a bit.
The apartment hunt: six days
Book a short Airbnb or coliving space for your first week. Do not commit to anything long term before you land. Photos lie. A neighborhood that looks perfect on Google Maps can feel completely wrong when you are standing in it.
Day one: check in, walk your target neighborhood, get a sense of which streets feel right and which do not. Day two and three: respond to all the Facebook messages, schedule viewings, visit five to seven apartments. Google Translate works fine for messages in Spanish. Nobody cares if your grammar is broken when you are asking “can I see the apartment tomorrow at 2pm?”
Day four and five: go back to your top two or three choices at different times. I cannot stress this enough. A street that is silent at 10am on a Tuesday can be a full blown block party at 11pm on a Friday. Test the WiFi speed inside the unit. Check the water pressure in the shower. Day six and seven: pick your apartment, negotiate the price, sign.
The one Colombian rental quirk to know
Colombia wants renters to have a fiador, a local guarantor who co-signs the lease. As a foreigner with no Colombian family and no Colombian employer, you do not have one. The workaround is a poliza de arrendamiento, a rental insurance policy that acts as your guarantor. Companies like Inmobu and Unifianza sell these. It costs roughly 20 to 30 percent of one month’s rent. Your landlord or agent can help you set it up.
Most furnished short term rentals marketed to foreigners skip this entirely and just ask for a security deposit. Both of the apartments I have rented here worked that way.
What I actually spent
My furnished one-bedroom in Laureles was $600 a month, including utilities and WiFi. A comparable Airbnb in the same neighborhood would have run $900 to $1,100. The Facebook group approach saved me somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. That is $300 to $500 a month, every month, for maybe an hour of scrolling through posts and sending messages. I will take that trade every time.
Neighborhood data from MiFinka and Expat.com 2026 guides. Rental practices from ColombiaVisas and firsthand nomad reports. Prices in USD as of mid-2026.
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