Pablo Escobar's fortified home — a brutalist eight-story concrete block in one of Medellin's plushest neighborhoods — was demolished on Friday as part of an effort to change the way the drug kingpin's story is told, DW reported.

The stronghold, known as the Monaco building, was razed to the ground with explosives in a show for a crowd of around 1,600 people including some families of Escobar victims.

Plans are in place to turn the property into a commemorative space to remember victims of the drug trade who were killed during the 1980s and 1990s in a bloody war with authorities.

The move is part of an initiative to put the darker side Medellin's violent past into the foreground, telling the stories of victims.

"It's not about erasing history but starting to tell it from the right side; that of the victims and the innocent heroes," Medellin's city hall tweeted.

Colombia President Ivan Duque flew to Medellin to visit the site, saying the demolition "signifies the defeat of the culture of illegality."

"It signifies that history won't be written from the perpetrator's perspective," he said before departing to the border town of Cucuta, where a benefit concert was being held to raise money for humanitarian aid for Venezuelans. 

With a proliferation of books, the hit Netflix series Narcos, and the tours of Escobar's old haunts in Medellin, some city residents worry that the drug lord's life is being glorified by a younger generation that didn't live through the violence.

Escobar was, at one point according to Forbes magazine, one of the world's richest men. He was killed in a rooftop shootout with police in 1993.