Pablo Escobar: The extravagant homes of the infamous billionaire drug lord

The most ruthless, feared and moneyed narco-trafficker of all time, Colombian cartel boss Pablo Escobar amassed a jaw-dropping residential real estate portfolio during his reign of terror, which came to an end in 1993 when he was killed by police. Click or scroll through to take a look around the drug lord’s key homes, from his lavish country estate – complete with a zoo, bullring, airport and more – to the luxury prison complex he designed for himself, featuring five-star amenities you won’t believe…

The third child of smallholder Abel and schoolteacher Hermilda, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born on 1 December 1949 in a humble yet roomy finca on his family’s farm in the village of El Tablazo, just outside the city of Rionegro (pictured), around 20 miles from Colombia’s second city Medellín.

Escobar spent the majority of his formative years in El Tablazo. In 1961, at the age of 11, the future cartel boss moved with his family to the neighbourhood of La Paz in Envigado, close to Medellín. His childhood home was a modest, long-since-demolished house provided by the state. The area is a densely built-up suburb today, but back then it was largely undeveloped.

Escobar had been conjuring up sly money-making schemes from an early age, but his criminal career kicked off in 1966. According to local legend, the teenager started a racket stealing tombstones, which were sandblasted and then resold, though some sources refute this. Pablo reportedly admitted to running street scams with his friends in his youth, as well as selling fake lottery tickets. After moving into car theft, Escobar – who was garnering a reputation for cold, calculating brutality – began kidnapping VIPs for ransom.

In 1971, Escobar’s gang abducted local industrialist Diego Echavarria. The businessman’s family paid the $50,000 ransom (£41k), but he was murdered anyway. Escobar made his first forays in the cocaine smuggling trade around this time. Bribing and butchering his way up the ladder, the burgeoning drug lord killed his rivals and formed the Medellín Cartel in the 1970s. Around the same time, Escobar was arrested for drug trafficking, but paid off the judge, who released him without charge, according to the book Killing Pablo.

In 1976, Escobar married Maria Victoria Henao, who was just 15 years old at the time. The couple went on to have two children together. In the years that followed, Escobar rapidly developed a massive narco distribution network, flooding the US with cocaine. With millions of dollars pouring in, the cartel boss set about creating his dream home. In 1979, he splurged a reported $63 million (£51.8m) on a 7,000-acre country estate around 80 miles east of Medellín. Here’s the entrance arch, which is adorned with a replica of the plane that carried Escobar’s first cargo of the illegal narcotic.

The cartel leader clearly pumped millions more into the lavish estate. He had roads, an airport and a heliport constructed, as well as artificial lakes and six swimming pools. A sprawling Colonial-style villa was built, featuring every luxury money could buy, and the estate was equipped with other wow-factor amenities including a zoo, dinosaur statues, tennis courts and a bullfighting arena.

Escobar also displayed a bullet-ridden 1930s sedan outside the villa, which he told people at various times reportedly belonged to John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde or Al Capone. Following the drug lord’s death in 1993, the mafioso estate was confiscated by the Colombian government. The mansion is a ruin today. While it was left to rot, however, other parts of the estate were repurposed and turned into a theme park.

This includes the zoo. Escobar imported more than 200 exotic animals, from elephants and giraffes to hippos. Following the drug baron’s death, most of the animals were moved to sanctuaries, but the hippos escaped and their numbers have since exploded. In 2022, they were declared an invasive species and a plan is currently underway to control their numbers.

Today, the theme park is a popular attraction. The zoo is now a savannah-inspired wildlife park with zebras, antelopes, emus, meerkats and crocodiles, while the artificial lakes and several of Escobar’s swimming pools now compose a fun water park, complete with this octopus-shaped water slide.

In 1980, a year after he bought Hacienda Nápoles, Escobar snapped up this 7,336-square-foot pastel-pink Miami mansion for $765,500 (£622k). Whether the cartel boss spent any time in the property is open to question – the flashy four-bedroom, six-bathroom villa is thought to have been used primarily by his henchmen as a cocaine drop safehouse.

The interior is pictured here when the property went up for sale long after the drug lord’s tenure. Escobar was buying up swathes of property at this time, from high-end estates to discreet safehouses. He was also ostensibly giving back to his local community by investing in housing projects for Medellín’s low-income residents, no doubt with a view to advancing his political ambitions. And it worked. Nicknamed “Robin Hood” by the city’s poor, the cartel boss’s popularity soared.

You can see the property’s lavish swimming pool framed by walls of floor-to-ceiling windows. Escobar was elected to Colombia’s Chamber of Representatives in 1982, conveniently gaining immunity from prosecution and gaining a diplomatic visa, which he used to travel to the US. But he was soon exposed as a criminal and expelled from Congress. The FBI began to investigate the drug lord, forcing him to go under the radar to evade justice, and the US authorities eventually seized the Florida mansion in 1987.

The property was sold in 1990 to local lawyer Roger Schindler, who paid $915,000 (£743k) for the privilege. It was then acquired in 2014 for just under $9.7 million (£7.9m) by Christian de Berdouaré, the owner of the Chicken Kitchen restaurant chain. After learning of its past, he had the mansion demolished but not before carrying out an extensive search of the property.

After all, Escobar was known to squirrel away vast sums of cash in his various residences around the globe. But while a hidden safe was recovered, no treasure was found, according to de Berdouaré. The restaurateur planned to build a modern home on the plot, but decided to offload it instead and the prime parcel sold in 2020 for just under $11 million (£8.9m).

With law enforcement breathing down his neck, Escobar bought a stunning out-of-the-way holiday home in 1984 to celebrate the birth of his daughter Manuela, naming the 20-acre estate in her honour. One of the drug lord’s favourite abodes, it provided him with an additional luxury bolthole to escape to when the going was getting tough.

The mansion was reportedly built with double-layered walls so that cocaine and cash could be stashed away in the hollows and was, unsurprisingly, loaded with drug baron-worthy amenities. As well as the gorgeous swimming pool, there was a private nightclub on the grounds, along with a guest house, seaplane dock, tennis courts and a football field that also served as a heliport.

In 1993, eight months before Escobar was killed, the holiday home was ripped apart by a bomb planted by Los Pepes, a vigilante death squad on a mission to assassinate the cartel boss. Escobar had been tipped off about the planned attempt on his life and escaped well before the device detonated.

Over the years, the abandoned holiday mansion has been taken over by nature but, the part of the property which wasn’t destroyed in the bombing – namely, the nightclub – was reportedly turned into a makeshift residence for Escobar’s former gardener. The ex-cartel employee lived there for more than 30 years before his eviction in 2019, when the Special Assets Society recovered ownership, and he even operated a bar and restaurant on the site.

The property is now open to the public and has a new lease of life as a paintballing venue, of all things. As for those hollow walls, we can safely assume that they have been scoured for money and treasure over the years, but nothing of value has ever been found, much to the disappointment of locals and visitors hoping for a windfall.

Escobar’s next major property buy was reportedly this hush-hush escape in the resort town of Tulum in Mexico. With the cops on his tail, the property provided the perfect sanctuary. Super-secluded amid lush tropical foliage and equipped with bulletproof walls, the high-end hideout would still tick all the boxes for a justice-dodging cartel leader.

Following Escobar’s death, the paradise property was pretty much abandoned to the elements until 2012, when it was discovered by New York art dealer Lio Malca. The avid collector acquired the estate and set about turning it into a lavish five-star art hotel, splashing a fortune on a spectacular renovation.

The 71-room Casa Malca opened its doors to paying guests in 2015 and is now regarded as one of Mexico’s finest hotels. Ultra-exclusive, the majority of the resort is strictly reserved for guests and offers exceptional privacy. Shrouded by dense undergrowth, it’s not hard to see why the protected spot initially caught Escobar’s eye all those years ago.

Highlights of the captivating contemporary hotel, which is peppered with artworks by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and KAWS, include a Keith Haring-themed bar, not to mention the aforementioned trio of restaurants, a beach garden complete with swings and hammocks, and the fabulous outdoor swimming pool you’ve just seen.

The best feature, though, has got to be the secret underground swimming pool, which is located beneath the main outdoor pool. It’s also the most intriguing spot in the hotel: Escobar is rumoured to have concealed enormous amounts of dirty drug money underground at the estate, along with goodness knows what else.

During the 1980s, Escobar also commissioned an OTT party pad on Isla Grande, a heavenly Caribbean island 22 miles off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia. Drowning in money, the cartel boss really went to town, ordering the construction of a supersized mansion, waterfront apartments, a courtyard featuring a resort-sized swimming pool, heliport and other decadent amenities.

All in all, the compound reportedly had over 300 rooms, so as you can imagine, the parties held here were not small-scale affairs. Escobar’s henchmen pulled out all the stops to make the place as fancy as possible and the opulence even extended to the showers, which it is said were made from gold.

The complex was heavily guarded when Escobar was in residence and any intruder discovered trespassing would have likely been killed on the spot, given the ruthlessness of the drug boss and his cartel henchmen. That all changed, of course, when the property was abandoned after Escobar’s death in 1993 and confiscated by the Colombian government.

The buildings were stripped to the bone and squatters soon moved in to take up home in the shell of the once sumptuous complex. They were joined by wild pigs and, over the years, the complex has fallen into serious neglect. Unlike other properties that belonged to Escobar which have been repurposed, this one has been left to decay. Here’s hoping something useful can be done with it in the future.

You can see the derelict state of the once-lavish structure here. By the mid-1980s, Escobar was riding high, despite his problems with the law and growing competition, with his operations pulling in a staggering $420 million (£342m) a week, which added up to an incredible $22 billion (£18bn) a year. During the latter half of the decade, Escobar controlled 80% of the global cocaine market and was worth an estimated $30 billion (£24.4bn) at his peak, making him the richest criminal of all time.

Escobar appeared on the inaugural Forbes World’s Billionaire List in 1987, with the magazine rather conservatively pegging his net worth at over $2 billion (£1.6bn). By this time, he’d accumulated yet another premium property, the imposing eight-storey Mónaco building near Medellín’s posh Club Campestre golf course.

Escobar and his family moved into the plush penthouse, one of the 12 apartments in the building, in the late 1980s. In addition to the ample living space, the block boasted two swimming pools, a tennis court and the obligatory secret panic room Escobar and his family could hunker down in, as well as a hidden vault for drugs, weapons and cash. Down in the basement, a garage with 34 spaces was used to store the cartel leader’s enviable collection of vintage cars and motorbikes.

All hell broke loose on 13 January 1988 when the building was severely damaged by a bomb planted by the rival Cali cartel, which had set out to kill Escobar and his family. They escaped death, but the blast killed three people and injured 10. Escobar’s daughter, Manuela, suffered hearing loss from the explosion. The attack was one of the key triggers of the bloody war between the competing cartels. The conflict raged from 1988 until Escobar’s death in 1993.

In 1989, Escobar had presidential nominee and old adversary Luis Carlos Galán murdered and then reportedly ordered the assassination of his successor, César Gaviria, by planting a bomb on a plane he was scheduled to board. Gaviria missed the flight but the device detonated anyway, killing all 107 passengers and crew, plus three people on the ground. This was the final straw. The following year, Gaviria was elected president and, with American support, vowed to hunt down Escobar and crush the cartels. As for the Mónaco building, it was confiscated by the authorities in 1990 and eventually demolished in 2019.

In its place is a memorial garden dedicated to the memory of those murdered by the cartels. The tranquil park features a mural with 46,000 bullet-like holes, representing the number of lives lost to drug violence in Colombia from 1983 to 1994. Before its demolition, the building had been somewhat glamourised and was even visited by celebrities, including rapper Wiz Khalifa, so the memorial garden makes for a timely reminder of the impact of Escobar’s crimes.

Aware the jig was up, Escobar agreed to surrender to the authorities but put forth a list of demands. As part of the deal, he would not be handed over to the Americans and would serve only five years in a personal prison built to his precise specifications. The Colombian government complied and La Catedral was constructed in Escobar’s hometown of Envigado and completed in June 1991.