El Clásico Paisa: How to See Nacional vs Medellín, and Where to Sit

Two clubs share one stadium in Medellín. Atlético Nacional play in green, the most successful and most supported club in the country. Independiente Medellín, usually called DIM or el Poderoso, play in red, older than Nacional and forever cast as the city’s other team. When they meet at the Estadio Atanasio Girardot it is called the Clásico Paisa, and it is one of the best reasons to plan a night around football anywhere in Colombia.

If you are living in or visiting Medellín, this is a thing worth doing once. It is also a thing worth doing with your eyes open. Here is how it actually works, and an honest answer to the question everyone eventually asks: should I sit in the sur?

What the rivalry is

Nacional and Medellín both call the Atanasio Girardot home, a roughly 45,000-seat stadium in the Laureles area of the city. There is no “away end” in the usual sense, because there is no away team. The derby is two halves of the same city, and the split is more about identity than geography. Nacional are the giant, the club with the most league titles and the only Colombian side to win the Copa Libertadores twice. DIM are the proud underdog with a fanatical base that measures itself against its bigger neighbor every season.

Each side has its barra brava, the organized hardcore support that lives in the stadium’s south end. Nacional’s is Los del Sur, founded in 1997, the green wall of flags and flares you will see in every photo of the stadium. DIM’s is the Rexixtenxia Norte. On a clásico day the choreography in those stands, the tifos, the drums, the songs that do not stop for ninety minutes, is genuinely one of the great sights in South American football. It is also where the trouble starts, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

A night I think about

I was at the Atanasio in December 2014 when Nacional drew River Plate one-all in the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final. Not even a loss. A draw, in a continental final, with the tie still alive.

It was enough. Out on La 70, the bar street that runs along the stadium, it came apart after the final whistle. Fans smashing whatever they could reach, bottles in the air, riot police moving in. I ended up sheltering inside a bakery while the owners yanked the metal roll-shutters down over the front, and we waited it out in the dark listening to it go off outside.

Nobody had lost anything. That is the part to sit with. The passion that makes a Colombian stadium the best atmosphere you will ever stand in is the same passion that turns a city block over a tie. The two are not separable. You are buying both when you buy the ticket.

The sur, honestly

I have sat in the sur at the Atanasio at least six times. I keep going back, so understand that what follows is not a warning to stay away. It is a warning to know what you are walking into.

The sur is the cheapest end, the standing barra-brava section, and it is the loudest, most committed, most alive part of the building. It is also a contact sport from the moment you walk in. Getting a beer and an arepa at halftime is its own event: a crushing scrum, everyone shoving the same direction, and a real fight just to work your way to the counter and back without losing your shoes. Nobody is angry at you. That is simply how the sur moves. If you are claustrophobic, or you brought your phone out to film, or you are there with kids, it is not the section for you.

And in the sur you do not just watch, you sing. Each club has its own songs, and the barra keeps them going for the full ninety minutes, drums and all, without a break. You are expected to be in it, jumping and singing along. Stand there silent and stiff like a tourist and you will get shoved around for it. The north and south ends run a constant battle of noise across the pitch, and the second you stop is the second you stick out.

When the sur is good, it is the best ninety minutes football offers. When it goes bad, it goes bad fast, and the recent record is not abstract. In September 2024 a clásico-tier match at this same stadium, Nacional against Junior, was stopped at the 56th minute when the barras clashed; around twenty fans and a police officer were hurt, and Nacional were handed six matches of stadium closure. The 2025 Copa Colombia final between Medellín and Nacional turned into a mass brawl on the pitch with people swinging PVC pipe, and police using controlled explosives to break it up. Part of what drives this is an ugly open secret of Colombian football: clubs have long funneled money and perks to their barras, and when Nacional moved to cut that off, the threats and the violence followed.

Where you should actually sit

For a first clásico, or any clásico with family, do not sit in the sur. Sit in the occidental, the main covered grandstand on the west side. It is the most expensive, the calmest, the best view, and the safest. The oriental across from it is the cheaper covered side and a reasonable middle ground. The norte is the other standing end. The sur you now understand.

A few rules that are not optional on a derby day:

• Do not wear the wrong colors. Green is Nacional, red is DIM. Wear neutral if you are not sure, and never wear one team’s colors in the other’s section.
• Check whether visiting fans are even allowed. For high-risk clásicos, authorities sometimes ban the away barra entirely, or restrict the match to home fans. This changes match to match.
• Travel light. Small cash, no jewelry, a cheap phone or none. The pickpocketing in the crush is a bigger day-to-day risk to a tourist than anything on the pitch.

How to buy tickets

Tickets go through the clubs and through Colombian ticketing platforms, TuBoleta being the main one, plus the box office, the taquilla, at the stadium for non-sellout matches. A normal-league ticket is cheap by foreign standards, in the tens of thousands of pesos for the standing ends and more for the occidental. Ignore the foreign resale sites quoting fifty or a hundred US dollars; those are tourist markups, not the real face price.

For a clásico specifically, buy early. These sell out, security screening is heavy, and turning up at the taquilla on the day expecting a sur ticket is how you end up watching it in a bar on La 70 instead. Bring your passport or cédula; ID is often checked against the ticket.

Make a night of it

The Atanasio sits in Laureles, one of Medellín’s best neighborhoods to begin with, and La 70 is a destination on a normal day, never mind a matchday. Get there early, eat before kickoff, find the bar energy on the street, and let the stadium fill up around you. If you are weighing where to base yourself in the city, our Medellín guide covers the neighborhoods, and our is Colombia safe in 2026 piece puts the matchday risk in the wider context of traveling here. For the bigger picture, start with our Colombian football guide, read how to buy tickets and pick a seat before you go, and note that the Superclásico against Millonarios is the other Nacional clásico worth knowing.

Go once. Sit in the occidental your first time, watch the sur do its thing from a safe distance, and decide for yourself whether you want to be down in it next time. Plenty of us did, and keep going back, knowing exactly what it is.