El Tour de La Ferro: Pereira's Community-Run Mural Corridor at the Airport Entrance

If you fly into Pereira, the road out of Aeropuerto Matecaña used to be the part of the trip nobody photographed. A kilometer of grey concrete, a few car-repair shops, and the kind of “do not stop here at night” reputation the tourism office quietly pretended did not exist.

That road is now Avenida del Arte, and the walking tour along it is called El Tour de La Ferro. Around 430 building facades have been painted by 60 local artists. The Colombian Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo and the national tourism fund FONTUR have folded it into the federal “Colombia, Destinos de Paz” program. The Alcaldía de Pereira and the Departamento de Risaralda are partners. None of that is the most interesting part. The most interesting part is that the people running it still live there.

What El Tour de La Ferro actually is

The official numbers, from the city of Pereira, the airport authority, and the project’s own brochure:

• About 1 km of street, branded as Avenida del Arte.
• 430 building facades repainted with murals.
• Roughly 100 finished works by 60 local artists.
• Tour starts at the Ferro Store in barrio Nacederos, comuna del ferrocarril.
• Organized programming runs Saturdays and Sundays from 1:00 to 6:00 PM. Booking ahead is the move, especially if you want a guide who speaks English.
• Free to walk. The guided tour and music stations work on a propina basis. Bring cash.

It is not a museum. It is a working barrio that has been painted. Houses still have laundry on the line. Tienda owners still sell empanadas through their front windows. The murals are the wallpaper, not the exhibit.

The story is the interesting part

Until 2020, the four neighborhoods that make up the comuna del ferrocarril (La Libertad, Nacederos, El Plumón, and Sierra Suroriental) appeared in city documents under language like peligro y abandono, danger and abandonment. Pereira’s airport sat at one end of the comuna, which meant every visitor’s first impression of the city was a barrio the city itself had written off.

A young cultural manager named Danilo Bermúdez did not accept that framing. In 2020 he pulled together a collective called Transformadores On Going, recruited residents, and started painting. The pitch to neighbors, repeated in interviews with the local press, was “Uno no está destinado a vivir toda la vida en la ruina.” You are not destined to live your whole life in the ruins.

The airport could have ignored him. It did the opposite. Aeropuerto Matecaña’s general manager, Francisco Valencia, attended the first talent showcase as a judge in November 2022 and committed institutional support. Iliana Pachón Bolaños, who runs Pereira’s tourism office, began publicly calling La Ferro a tourism corridor rather than a problem to clean up. By 2025 the federal Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo and FONTUR had certified it as part of Colombia’s national peace-tourism program.

That is the unusual part. Most Colombian neighborhood-renewal stories are either pure community effort that runs out of money, or pure top-down government showcase that residents resent. La Ferro is one of the rare ones where a 25-year-old organizer, the airport authority, the city, and the federal tourism ministry agreed on a direction and stayed agreed on it for five years.

What you actually do on the tour

El Tour de La Ferro is a walking route between stations, not a passive mural gallery. The official stops, taken from the project’s own materials:

• Callejón de los Visitantes, an alley of murals co-created with visiting artists. The classic photo stop.
• Zona de Rap, where local kids freestyle live. Bring a phone with battery if you want to record.
• Tour de La Ferro, a sit-down conversation with the barrio leaders about what the project actually took to build.
• Estación Fuego de Tambó, drumming and percussion. Hands-on if you want it.
• A gastronomy stop featuring aborrajados, the fried-plantain-and-cheese specialty from the Valle del Cauca that has become a La Ferro signature.

Local food at the stations runs COP 5,000 to COP 15,000 per item. Bring small bills. The corridor is a community project, which means hours occasionally shift around weddings, weather, and whoever has the keys to the speaker that day.

A reasonable expectation is two to three hours. People who try to “see La Ferro in 30 minutes between flights” miss the point. The murals reward standing still and asking the woman selling tinto who painted the wall behind her, because the answer is usually her cousin.

Getting there

From Aeropuerto Internacional Matecaña (PEI): 5 minutes walking, 2 minutes by car. The corridor begins at the airport entrance. The official meeting point for guided tours is the Ferro Store in barrio Nacederos. Walk out of the terminal and follow Avenida del Arte.

From El Centro Pereira: a taxi runs around COP 12,000 to COP 18,000 depending on traffic and time of day, ten to fifteen minutes. Buses headed toward the airport pass nearby for COP 2,800. Tell the driver “La Ferro Store” or “entrada del aeropuerto, Avenida del Arte, barrio Nacederos.”

If you are already touring the Eje Cafetero and based in Salento or Filandia, La Ferro pairs neatly with a Pereira day trip. Most coffee-region itineraries skip Pereira entirely in favor of the prettier pueblos. La Ferro is a reason to actually stop in the city for an afternoon instead of using its airport as a bus stop.

Why expats should care

Pereira is the cheapest of the three big Coffee Region cities (Pereira, Manizales, Armenia). It gets less attention from English-language expat guides than Medellín or Bogotá, partly because it is smaller and partly because there is no Poblado-equivalent neighborhood to anchor the usual content. That gap is where the interesting moves happen.

When the airport authority partners with a community collective to repaint 430 buildings and the federal tourism ministry certifies the result as a peace-tourism destination, that is a signal worth reading. Not a guarantee that property values will move or that the comuna del ferrocarril is suddenly a place to buy an apartment. Just a signal that institutional Colombia is investing in barrios it used to ignore. Watch what happens to the rest of that comuna over the next two years.

Local tips from the collective

Straight from the Transformadores brochure:

• Comfortable clothes. Sneakers or light shoes.
• Hat or cap, sunblock. The corridor is mostly open-air.
• Refillable water bottle.
• Be respectful of the people whose front porches you are walking past.
• Ask questions. Every station has a story.
• If you can, buy a souvenir at the Ferro Store. Money goes directly to the collective.

If you are going

• Where: Avenida del Arte, entrance to Aeropuerto Matecaña, barrio Nacederos, Pereira. Meeting point: Ferro Store. Open in Google Maps.
• When: Saturdays and Sundays, 1:00 to 6:00 PM for organized programming. Walkable any time during daylight.
• Cost: free to walk. Guided tour, food, and music run on tips and small purchases. Bring cash.
• Time needed: 2 to 3 hours.
• Pair with: a coffee-finca tour out of Salento, or a stop in the Eje Cafetero on the way to or from Bogotá.

Contact and bookings

• Collective: Colectivo Transformadores On Going.
• Instagram: @laferrotransformadores
• Facebook: Laferrotransformadores
• TikTok: @laferrotransformadores
• Phone / WhatsApp: +57 302 744 5511
• Email: [email protected]
• Backed by: Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo, FONTUR Colombia, Alcaldía de Pereira, Departamento de Risaralda, Beta Group, Fundación Monte Sión. Part of the national “Colombia, Destinos de Paz” program.

We will update this post as the project grows. If you visit and the hours have shifted or new murals have gone up, tell us at [email protected].