Is There an Island Pablo Escobar Mansion Near Cartagena?

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Ah, Pablo Escobar, arguably Colombia’s most famous, and certainly its most infamous, native son.

The kingpin of the Medellín Cartel, Escobar wrecked havoc on Colombia’s institutions and is responsible directly or indirectly for countless deaths in Colombia and abroad. For better or worse, however, he holds a special place in the (mostly international) collective pop culture imagination.

Which is why, for better or worse, many people come to Colombia wanting to learn more about him, much to many Colombians’ chagrin, I might add.

Included in that fascination is a desire to visit an alleged private Pablo Escobar island in the Rosario Islands off the coast of Cartagena. There’s an abandoned and dilapidated building in the islands that many claim is a former Pablo Escobar mansion.

But is this true? Did Pablo Escobar really own a private island near Cartagena? Read on to learn more about the evidence for and against this claim that there is a Pablo Escobar house in Cartagena’s islands.

Examining the Private Pablo Escobar Island Mansion Claim

If you take a look at social media or websites of tour operators, travel blogs, or YouTube videos about Cartagena, you might see two common claims of Escobar connections you can see in the Rosario Islands, located not far off the coast from Cartagena.

Those two common Escobar claims are:

• There is an incomplete Pablo Escobar mansion on an island possibly owned by the drug lord himself.
• There is an airplane that crashed running drugs for Escobar you can see when snorkeling.

We are going to deal with the first claim about the supposed private Pablo Escobar island and mansion in this article (Look for another related to the plane soon).

Countless Rosario Islands tours go by this alleged Escobar mansion everyday, and many guides make a point of pointing it out.

The Rosario Islands are all but a must see on a visit to Cartagena, by the way.

If you want to do the islands and see the alleged Pablo Escobar mansion for yourself, a private boat rental is a great way to do the islands and is very cost effective with a group.

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Evidence There Was a Pablo Escobar Mansion in Cartagena’s Rosario Islands

The claim for a private Pablo Escobar island mansion points to a large, white, abandoned building on Isla Grande.

Depending on who is telling the story, it was either his tranquil island escape, the site of lavish parties, the site of secret cartel meetings, or all of the above.

Some variations of the claim go as far as to say all of Isla Grande, the largest island in the Rosario Islands but still relatively small with a size of about a square mile, was Pablo Escobar’s private island.

There are a few main sources of evidence that there is a Pablo Escobar mansion.

One are the tour guides and boat captains who identify it as such as they take tourists by it. Another are the websites and social media from tour agencies advertising you can see it.

There are a number of travel bloggers and YouTubers who have produced content about it, likely repeating the claims they heard from guides or possibly repeating what they read on another blog or saw on another YouTube video.

There are also a few larger online publications like Atlas Obscura and Business Insider, who also have published articles making this claim, lending what appears to be further evidence.

Finally, there’s even a Discovery Channel series about Escobar that visits the supposed Escobar island mansion.

Doubting the Pablo Escobar Private Island Mansion Claim?

I’ll be honest, I repeated this claim on this site for a long time too.

I had guides and boat captains point the building out to us, and I’d seen it mentioned elsewhere.

It seemed to make intuitive sense: Escobar had a lot of money, and the Rosario Islands are gorgeous. If I had a lot of money, wouldn’t I want a private mansion here?

Sure I would!

So, I didn’t really give a lot of thought to the question of whether or not it was true.

Actually, it was someone throwing shade at a tour operator for mentioning the supposed crashed airplane on social media and saying it was a myth that led me to investigate both claims a bit more.

Credit to Kristy Ellis of Cartagena Connections, a local travel agency, for that by the way.

Good former History major that I am, I went down the rabbit hole…

Debunking the Pablo Escobar Mansion Myth

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, the claim that there is a former private Pablo Escobar island and Pablo Escobar mansion in the Rosario Islands is almost assuredly completely false.

Come down the rabbit hole with me and see why.

First, there’s no clear evidence that the property belonged to Escobar or that he had any connection to it beyond the claims from bloggers, tour agencies, and online publications who state it as a matter of fact or make vague references to locals reporting it as such.

However, there is some hard evidence that it belongs to someone else.

According to this article from El Tiempo newspaper (in Spanish), locals that live on Isla Grande claim the supposed Pablo Escobar mansion on Isla Grande in fact belonged to the Turbay family, from which hails former Colombian President Julio Cesar Turbay.

That article cites locals that claim the building was meant to be a hotel, and that the government ordered the ending of construction before it was finished due to environmental and conservation concerns.

This article from news magazine Semana, this one from Infobae, and this one from Prensa Libre all cite the same claim that the property belonged to the Turbay family.

Now, the other history majors and skeptics out there will point out that all of these, including the El Tiempo article, seem to just be syndicated (or maybe plagiarized) articles paraphrasing each other and parroting the same claim, not quite unlike the bloggers and YouTubers who parrot the Escobar claim.

And they’d be right.

There’s scant evidence of the Turbay family owning the property, but, unlike the Escobar claim, there is at least some, and it’s corroborated in a few others.

For example, I did manage to find this article, also published in El Tiempo, from 2002.

It describes an effort that year by authorities trying to sort out land ownership rights in the islands. It seems this was the first time there had been much effort to impose any form of government regulation around construction on the islands, due in part to worry that construction was damaging the reefs.

Actually, if you read Spanish it’s kind of an interesting read as it discusses the dispute between the government claiming national heritage ownership of them and locals who claim they have records that show the sale of the land over the years and can be tied back all the way to the 17th century when supposedly the Spanish crown granted the islands to a conquistador and effectively turned them into private property.

There’s a humorously named Isla Note Vendo mentioned too.

But I’ve digressed.

If you scroll down to the report on the land owners served notice that they need to show proper documentation of the title to their land, you can see the name “Antonio Turbay (Casablanca – sector Caño Ratón),” with the parenthesis indicating the name and location of the property.

In this article from El Espectador, about a visit by authorities to the islands in 2013, again related to land rights, Antonio Turbay, a cousin of the ex-president, is also noted as the owner of the property.

He is also cited as the owner of the property in an interview with a native islander in this YouTube video that debunks the Escobar mansion myth. The bit about the government stopping construction due to environmental concerns made in that video also lines up with what both the the 2002 article seems to suggest and the more recent ones state.

It also seems odd that neither of the two articles discussing the land ownership issues mentions the island as having belonged to or even associated with Pablo Escobar.

To be honest, given the fact that at least one of the more recently articles that debunk the myth I pointed to above cites that video, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s their only source. It’d be nice if one of the supposedly professional journalists working for any of those larger publications did some real journalism and consulted locals themselves or consulted land records to confirm.

I don’t have the resources to do that, but I feel like the evidence that the Turbay family did in fact own the supposed Escobar property in 2002 is evidence enough for me to conclude it is extremely unlikely to have any connection to Escobar.

Escobar’s Medellín Cartel kidnapped Julio César Turbay’s daughter and she was subsequently killed in a police rescue attempt.

So, it seems unlikely his cousin was involved with an Escobar island mansion. Even in the unlikely event that he was, why would an already rich and powerful family participate in some weird scheme to put a property that actually belonged to Escobar in their name?

I guess there’s some slim sliver of possibility that Escobar owned the property at some point and the Turbay family somehow acquired it later.

Even in that very unlikely case though, it’s impossible this was a mansion where Escobar had elaborate island parties or cartel meetings.

Look at it! Seriously go watch one of the YouTube videos.

It doesn’t look like it fell into disrepair, it looks like it was never finished. There aren’t remnants of any furniture. Most of the ceiling and roofing is clearly unfinished.

It also looks much more like a hotel than a home.

Given the fact that there is absolutely no hard evidence linking Escobar to the property, there is hard evidence linking it to the Turbay family, and the incomplete hotel story is much more convincing based on the appearance of the property, I’m confident the Pablo Escobar island mansion claim is nothing more than a myth.

Where Did this Myth Come From?

Good question!

My guess is a tour guide made this up at some point, whether it was pulling a tourist’s leg as a joke, an attempt to impress their audience with what they thought was a cool exaggeration, or even an honest mistake repeating something they heard and thought was true.

Or maybe a tourist made it up and some tour guide thought it was clever and began repeating it.

Or maybe a local on the island at some point began telling the story. In at least one of the YouTube videos out there there’s a sign identifying it as Pablo’s house with a price for taking photos, so it sounds like someone is at least profiting from the claim.

Who knows?

Needless to say, it’s been perpetuated into one of the many myths and legends around Escobar, and I suspect people will be asking to see the Pablo Escobar mansion in the Rosario Islands for quite some time to come.

Some Personal Thoughts and Reflections on this Myth

I have two broad thoughts on this myth of a Pablo Escobar mansion on Isla Grande to be honest.

First, the obvious one: yes, it’s just a tad problematic that we as a collective culture seem to be so interested in Escobar.

Many Colombians rightfully lament that so many people’s impression of and interest in their country are connected to Escobar. Many also get pretty fairly annoyed by foreigners coming and wanting to learn about Escobar. They’d like you to be interested in and celebrate just about anything else about their country.

As someone who’s likely to stop if I see The Godfather, Scarface, or Goodfellas on when I’m channel surfing, I think the oh, you’re such a horrible person for wanting to learn about Escobar schtick is a little unfair and unnecessarily self righteous.

So, do the Escobar tour in Medellín if you want.

But don’t buy the Pablo T shirt.

And maybe consider using your interest in Escobar as an entry point to learn about Colombia’s broader conflict of which Escobar was both symptom and cause.

And also eat Colombian food, drink Colombian coffee, and try your best to move your hips like Shakira, and go back and tell your friends how great Colombia and the Colombian people are.

As someone who makes much of my income publishing information online, what I actually find more interesting, and what I think may be more problematic, though is what the perpetuation of this myth reveals about our internet echo chamber.

These kinds of things get repeated just enough times by tour guides, rather as a joke, embellishment, or honest mistake, before they end up mentioned in blogs, in YouTube videos, and on social media.

Then, we end up in a sort of invirtuous cycle, where each blog post, Instagram photo, tour agency sales page, and YouTube video not only perpetuates the myth but serves as further evidence for those that actually care to research the claims they make, not to mention inspiration for others to go and visit and recount their own experience, adding yet more supposed evidence.

And round and round we go.

To be clear, I don’t want to throw too much shade at all my fellow online content creators. Like I said near the top, I had a line repeating this claim in my guide to the islands at one point.

However, I really don’t have much sympathy for the people who created dedicated blog posts or YouTube videos solely around visiting the mansion, and even less for the larger publications who have run this claim.

For example, there are two Atlas Obscura articles, both of which were written by the same author and paraphrase each other. Both claim the author hiked for hours through the forest to reach the house, although in one that claim is made immediately following a paragraph where he notes the island is only a few kilometers long.

Oh and the more recently published one also cites the first one, again written by the same author, as a source.

It’s just clickbait by people who couldn’t be bothered to actually research the thing they are supposedly making a detailed post or video about.

At the least you think they could have, you know, asked the people that live around there about the history of the property like the makers of the Familia Nómade video that debunks linked above did.

Kudos to them and check out their channel here, by the way.

Of course, this cycle is only going to both accelerate and grow into an ever exponentially larger feedback loop with AI.

I asked ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Meta AI, and DeepSeek if there was a Pablo Escobar mansion on an island near Cartagena while writing this article in February 2025.

ChatGPT, Meta AI, and DeepSeek said yes, Pablo Escobar did have a mansion on Isla Grande with no acknowledgement of any doubt around the claim. Chat GPT claimed there may have been a secret helicopter pad. Meta and DeepSeek both claimed Escobar had a private zoo on the island too.

Meta’s also claimed “it’s not exactly an island near Cartagena, but rather near the coastal town of Santa Marta, Colombia.”

Yikes!

Gemini declined to give a firm answer. To its credit, it does point out there is no evidence it belonged to Escobar but hedges its bets by noting that it is popularly believed to be Escobar’s although some sources say it belongs to the Turbay family.

Round and round we go indeed.

I’d be curious to know what your AI prompts return if you’re reading this at a later date, by the way. Feel free to share in the comments.

I hope this article educated you with some as accurate as I could find information about the alleged Pablo Escobar mansion in Cartagena’s islands, and maybe it’ll be a small drop in the bucket, or I guess I should say brake on the feedback loop, towards reversing the perpetuation of this myth.

Then again, a big reason I’m writing it is because I think it just may attract some clicks to my site.