Colombian Entrepreneur Makes Money Literally Out of Thin Air

Juan Carlos Alvarado, a young entrepreneur from Medellin, Colombia, claims he makes hundreds of dollars per day selling bottles of air from his home city.

Medellin, Colombia’s second-largest city, is known as the “City of Eternal Spring,” because of its pleasant climate all year round. But you can’t sell climate to someone thousands of miles away, now can you? Air is a whole other matter though, and it’s actually a tried-and-true business model. People have been selling cans of fresh air and bottles of fresh air to people in polluted countries like China for years, and it was actually these success stories that inspired Juan Carlos Alvarado, a native of Medellin, to start his own air-selling business.

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Drug Lord Pablo Escobar Becomes Colombian Tourist Attraction

When Pablo Escobar died in 1993, the people of Medellin, Colombia, sighed in relief. But little did they know that the world’s most notorious criminal at the time would become one of their country’s most popular tourist attractions.

The legacy of Escobar lives on in Medellin, in a different and slightly unusual manner. The man and his life are now sold as a tourist attraction to visitors; this has proven to be quite popular. Escobar, who was responsible for several acts of terrorism such as blowing up the Government’s Security Ministry, assassinating a Presidential candidate, bombing a civilian airliner, and waging a war in which thousands of people were killed, would have least expected that the memories he left behind would one day serve as a means to attract tourists to Colombia.

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