Is There a Submerged Pablo Escobar Plane in Cartagena’s Rosario Islands?

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If you peruse social media posts and YouTube videos from travelers or the social media ads and websites of Cartagena travel agencies offering tours to the nearby Rosario Islands, you’re likely to encounter stories of a unique attraction lurking in the depths of the waters of these idyllic coral islands:

A submerged airplane that was involved in the drug smuggling operations of Pablo Escobar that you can see for yourself snorkeling or diving.

But is there really a Pablo Escobar plane in Cartagena’s Rosario Islands?

We’ll take a dive ourselves into the evidence for and against the claim that there is a sunken Pablo Escobar plane in the Rosario Islands in this article.

The Alleged Sunken Pablo Escobar Plane Near Cartagena

There are two sites in the Rosario Islands commonly associated with Pablo Escobar:

• A large abandoned construction that many claim was Pablo Escobar’s mansion and island vacation getaway.
• A small, sunken airplane in the waters nearby that was supposedly involved in running drug shipments for Escobar.

We’ll be dealing with the second claim in this post. You can learn more about the first claim in this post about the alleged island Pablo Escobar mansion.

The supposed Pablo Escobar plane in question is located in a narrow area of water nestled in the Rosario Islands, about a 45 minute boat ride from Cartagena.

The islands are a must see in Cartagena, by the way. The best way to see them, not to mention get up close to the supposed sunken Pablo Escobar airplane is with a private boat rental, which is surprisingly affordable.

You can learn about making a private Cartagena boat rental with our local partner here. You can compare different ways to visit the Rosario Islands here.

Many Rosario Islands day trips and tours also make stops for snorkeling at the sunken airplane that many guides claim belonged to Pablo Escobar.

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Is the Pablo Escobar Airplane in the Rosario Islands Fact or Fiction?

Interestingly, despite my numerous visits to the Rosario Islands over the decade plus I lived in Cartagena, I didn’t ever hear much about there being a plane that belonged to Escobar in the islands until more recently, probably around 2018 or 2019.

It struck me as a bit odd that I had never heard of it being a thing before.

Nonetheless, I started seeing it mentioned more and more often by tour operators offering tours to the islands, most often on social media.

There’s now plenty of YouTube videos and travel blogs claiming it as one of the best attractions and snorkeling spots in the islands too.

We actually snorkeled here and got a look at it for ourselves on one of our visits to the islands.

If you’re curious about my opinion, it’s kind of neat. It’s just shallow enough so you can make it out from the surface, but deep enough to where you can’t see much of it or get close to it.

Much like the rumors of the Pablo Escobar home on nearby Isla Grande, I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought.

I guess it seems odd a plane would just happen to crash into the waters so close to these islands, islands I might add that do not have the infrastructure to run any kind of drug smuggling operation, much less a landing strip.

Still, much like the other bloggers, vloggers, and influencers who post about it, I just assumed it to be true.

However, an operator shared information on their tour one day in my Cartagena travel tips Facebook group (well, actually it was my older, now defunct group). One commenter claimed the supposed Escobar plane was a myth and admonished them for continuing to perpetuate it.

Credit to Kirsty Ellis, who runs the local Cartagena Connections travel agency, for that comment, by the way.

Intrigued, I decided to investigate it a bit myself.

Evidence for Their Being a Crashed Pablo Escobar Plane in the Rosario Islands

Let’s dive into what I found.

Honestly, there is no real, credible evidence that this plane belonged to Escobar.

There’s tons of blogs, YouTube videos, and social media posts about it. I presume these are mostly well intentioned content creators just sharing what they were told by their guides or learned about somewhere else.

And of course, there are the social media posts, ads, and tour sales pages from agencies and tour operators who promote this as one of the attractions you’ll see on their tours.

However, there are no news publications about the crash, when it happened, or how Escobar was connected.

It should be said that the lack of evidence isn’t necessarily disproof.

It’s a small plane that went down in a chain of islands largely isolated until the last couple decades in a country Escobar terrorized more than enough for journalists to turn a blind eye to any plane crash he didn’t want people to know about.

However, there is at evidence that the plane has an entirely different origin, one with no connection whatsoever to the notorious drug lord.

Evidence Against This Being a Plane that Belonged to Pablo Escobar

When Kristy claimed this story about a crashed Pablo Escobar airplane in the Rosario Islands was a myth, she said it was put there as part of a research project and thesis by a marine biology student. Someone else commented the same.

Curious, I went looking for more information.

Nearly everything I found online were the aforementioned social media posts and blogs that claim the plane was Escobar’s.

Some claim it crashed, while others claimed it was placed there by the Colombian government as an artificial reef after being confiscated.

Now there is some evidence for that second claim.

According to this article from Colombian newspaper El Tiempo, the government sunk 6 confiscated drug planes, and had plans to sink as many as 40 as artificial reefs off the coast. It does state the Rosario Islands as one of the places where they planned to sink planes.

However, there’s no mention that any of these planes belonged to Escobar or the Medellín Cartel, and the article, published in 2024, more than 30 years after Escobar’s death, explicitly says that they were only recently confiscated and had been involved in the drug trade just days before.

There is evidence of a research project involving a sunken airplane used as an artificial reef in the Rosario Islands though.

I’m having a tough time remembering if it was Kristy or the other commenter that stated the name of the marine biology student that did the project as Claudio Obregó, but I went digging for it.

I unfortunately can’t find the full text anywhere online. There is a listing for what appears to be the article on Colombia’s National Park’s website. You can see the listing here.

That title does not make it entirely clear a sunken airplane was used, but it does say a reef near Isla Naval in the Rosario Islands.

Both this paper (page 35) and this paper (page 6-7) cite the Obregón paper and explicitly state the study used a sunken airplane as an artificial reef.

Isla Naval is the tiny island in between Isla Grande and Isleta, exactly where the supposed sunk Pablo Escobar plane is located.

That’s enough evidence for me to feel very confident concluding the submerged airplane you can see snorkeling in the Rosario Islands was placed there as part of Obregón’s research project.

I guess it is true that there is not a record of where the plane came from, at least publicly available online.

Could a small plane that had fallen in disrepair enough for a grad student to use it in a research project in the early 1990s (Obregón’s research was published in 1994, about a year after Escobar’s death) have been involved in the drug trade during Escobar’s reign?

It’s possible.

But it definitely didn’t crash there, and it wasn’t placed there by the Colombian government, the two origins that most commonly accompany the Escobar plane myth.

I’ve never heard any guide say, blogger write, or vlogger claim, that the plane belonged to Pablo Escobar, was confiscated, and a marine biology student placed it there as part of a study on artificial reefs.

You could possibly convince me of that, but the fact that the stories linking the plane to Escobar all omit any mention of the research study, almost assuredly the origin of the plane, leads me to believe those stories are simply myths, probably originally made up as part of a mostly innocent embellishment to impress tourists and attract more of them.

Unless there is some definitive evidence linking this plane to Escobar, I am more than comfortable concluding the claim that you can see a sunken Pablo Escobar plane snorkeling in the Rosario Islands is fiction.

A Real (?) Real Pablo Escobar Plane in the Bahamas

There is another alleged Pablo Escobar plane in the Bahamas.

Close Escobar associate Carlos Lehder operated virtual control of the island of Norman’s Cay in the Bahamas and used it as a hub for cocaine shipments between Colombia and the US for a few years. (Diego in Blow is based on Lehder).

There is a sunken airplane here that many also claim was a drug running plane for Escobar and Lehder and crashed carrying drugs.

According to this blog post, from a couple that live on Norman’s Cay, and its citation of a book written by the pilot, the plane was an old British World War II era C-46 cargo plane that the pilot brought to show Lehder as a possible plane to use in smuggling. However, the pilot, apparently a drinker, crashed it while doing some practice runs after a few too many.

So, it sounds like that plane is subject to much of the same embellishments as the supposed Pablo Escobar plane in Cartagena’s Rosario Islands.

I think these are good examples of how myths get spread, and how they get amplified by online sources that don’t verify them.

I asked ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s AI, and DeepSeek the question “Is there a Pablo Escobar plane in the Rosario Islands near Cartagena?” when I was working on this post in February 2025.

I was pleasantly surprised that none of them definitively claimed yes and noted that while there is a plane wreck associated with Escobar in the Rosario Islands, there is no evidence for the claim. This is an improvement over when I asked them about the alleged Escobar mansion on Isla Grande, when all but Gemini seemed comfortable stating emphatically that the property was an Escobar mansion.

Meta’s continued to be the worst. It claimed the plane sunken in the Rosario Islands, while it may not have been Escobar’s, was a C-46.

You can read more about my thoughts on our internet ecosystem as well as what I think about tourist interest in Escobar in the post on the Pablo Escobar island mansion myth.

Here, I’ll simply conclude by encouraging you to read travel blogs like mine that did some actual research and definitely can give you better info than AI!

Well, at least until those AIs train themselves on this content, some lazy bloggers use it, and we have a whole new feedback loop of web content disproving the claim.