San Antonio's Buñuelo Grandmothers: Frying Through the Aguacero

The rain started at 2:14 in the afternoon, the way it does in Medellín — not gradually, but all at once, as if someone had overturned something enormous. I was standing under the corrugated tin awning of a tienda on the edge of San Antonio, watching water sheet off the roof in a single curtain, when the smell hit me. Hot oil, raw sugar, anise. Somewhere behind me, through the rain, someone was frying buñuelos.

San Antonio sits on a hill above the Medellín River, and its small plaza draws a particular kind of crowd in the late afternoon: couples on benches, men playing cards under trees, tourists who wandered uphill from El Poblado and are now slightly winded. But the neighborhood's real pulse lives in the hands of a half-dozen older women who set up portable gas burners and cast-iron pots along the perimeter of the plaza and the surrounding streets. They fry buñuelos and sell them in paper bags, and they do this whether it's raining or not.

1. What a buñuelo actually is (and isn't)

Outside Colombia, people sometimes call buñuelos "cheese doughnuts." This is technically defensible and spiritually wrong. A doughnut is soft inside. A buñuelo, done right, has a shell that resists your teeth for half a second before giving way to a core that is dense, slightly elastic, faintly sour from the queso costeño mixed into the dough. It is closer to a savory pão de queijo than to anything you'd eat with coffee in North America.

The dough is simple — cornstarch or corn flour, eggs, cheese, sometimes a pinch of sugar. The women in San Antonio each have their own ratio, and they will not tell you what it is.

2. The grandmothers of the plaza

I use the word "grandmothers" because the vendors themselves do. "Somos las abuelas de los buñuelos," one woman told me, laughing, when I asked if she had a business name. She didn't. None of them do. They operate without signage, without Instagram handles, without the paraphernalia of modern food culture. Their stalls are a folding table, a burner, a pot, a slotted spoon, and a bag of dough wrapped in cloth.

Three women tend to occupy the south side of the Plazoleta de San Antonio most afternoons from around 3:00 p.m. until the oil runs out or the crowd thins, whichever comes first. A fourth sets up closer to the church steps. I was told a fifth works the corner of Carrera 44 and Calle 46, but I never found her.

The one I returned to three times was stationed near the Botero sculptures, a woman in her late sixties with a pot so blackened it looked geological. Her buñuelos were 2,000 COP each — about $0.50 — and she sold them in bags of five for 8,000 COP.

3. Frying through the rain

Medellín's rainy season — roughly April through May, then September through November — doesn't pause commerce in San Antonio. It just rearranges it. The card players leave. The couples leave. The tourists descend the hill toward their Airbnbs. The buñuelo grandmothers stay.

I watched one woman slide a plastic tarp from beneath her table and drape it over a makeshift frame of broomsticks while her oil continued to shimmer. Her hands moved without urgency. She'd clearly done this hundreds of times. The rain came down hard enough that the Botero sculptures across the plaza looked like they were dissolving at the edges, and she stood there turning buñuelos with a spoon, protected by a square meter of blue plastic.

The aguacero — the word Paisas use for the sudden, theatrical downpours that define Medellín's afternoons — is not a disruption to these women. It is the backdrop.

4. Don't bother with the buñuelos at El Tesoro mall

I'll say this plainly: the buñuelos sold at chain bakeries and mall food courts across Medellín are a different object. They're uniform, machine-rounded, often reheated. The ones at El Tesoro's food court sat under a heat lamp looking glazed and sorry. Skip them.

The distinction matters because texture is everything here. A buñuelo that's been sitting for forty-five minutes has lost the one quality that makes it worth eating — that initial crack, the resistance of the crust giving way to the pull of the cheese inside. You need to eat one within three minutes of it leaving the oil. The plaza grandmothers hand them to you almost too hot to hold.

5. The Botero sculptures and the strange gravity of the plaza

San Antonio's plaza is probably better known for the Fernando Botero sculptures that sit on it — 23 of them, round and smooth and oversized, donated by the artist to his hometown. One of them, Pájaro de Paz, was damaged in a 1995 bombing and left in its fractured state beside a second, intact version Botero donated afterward. The two birds sit side by side. One whole, one torn open.

Most visitors come for these. The sculptures are free to see, open at all hours, and surrounded by enough foot traffic that the area feels safe well into the evening. I found the plaza most interesting around 4:30 p.m., when the light drops below the apartment buildings to the west and the Botero figures throw long shadows across the concrete, and the smell of frying oil from the buñuelo stalls starts to compete with the smell of rain.

The plaza is at the intersection of Carrera 44 and Calle 46, walkable from the San Antonio metro station in about eight minutes uphill.

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6. A single bowl of hogao, and why it matters

One of the grandmothers — the one near the church steps — sold her buñuelos with a small plastic cup of hogao on the side. Hogao is a cooked sauce of tomato, scallion, and cumin, reduced until thick. Hers was loose, almost brothy, with visible seeds from the tomatoes and a color that sat somewhere between rust and brick.

I did not expect this. Most buñuelos are eaten plain, or with a cup of hot chocolate on the side. The hogao transformed the experience from snack to meal. The acidity cut through the fat of the fried dough, and the cumin lingered after the cheese had gone. I went back the next day and she wasn't there. The day after that, she was.

No hours posted. Nothing guaranteed.

7. What else to eat nearby

San Antonio has a handful of sit-down restaurants that cater to the mix of locals and foreigners who populate the neighborhood. Hato Viejo, on Calle 44, serves a solid bandeja paisa for around 32,000 COP — the portion is enormous, and the chicharrón is fried to order rather than pre-cooked, which matters.

Mondongos, a few blocks away on Carrera 45, is the more famous choice, but I found it loud and oversalted on my last visit. The people who swear by it tend to have been going since the 1970s, and I suspect loyalty is doing some of the work that flavor used to.

For something lighter, there's a woman who sells empanadas from a cart near the corner of Calle 46 and Carrera 45 in the early evening. Hers are corn-flour, crisp, filled with seasoned potato. Three for 5,000 COP.

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8. The economics of a buñuelo

At 2,000 COP apiece, a buñuelo is among the cheapest prepared foods you can buy in Medellín. A bag of five costs less than a small coffee at most Laureles cafés. The margins for the vendors are thin — queso costeño is not cheap, and cooking oil has risen sharply since 2022. Several people in the neighborhood told me that the number of buñuelo vendors in San Antonio has dropped over the past decade. Ten years ago, you might have seen eight or nine on a weekend afternoon. Now it's four or five.

This is not a story about something disappearing. Not yet. But the math is not working in their favor.

9. Timing your visit

Go on a weekday if you can. Weekends bring more foot traffic to the plaza, which sounds like an advantage but mostly means more competition for the buñuelos and more noise from portable speakers. Wednesday and Thursday afternoons were the quietest during my visits in October.

Arrive by 3:00 p.m. The vendors don't all show up at the same time, but by mid-afternoon the oil is hot and the first batches are coming out. By 6:00 p.m., most have packed up.

And if it rains — stay. Everyone else will leave, and you'll have the plaza, the Boteros, and the smell of frying cheese dough mostly to yourself. The buñuelos taste better in the rain. I have no scientific basis for this. But I'm certain of it.