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Imagine the real estate ad: "Dead drug lord's ranch, nestled on 2,000 hectares of prime Colombian cattle country, with 5,000-foot airstrip, 1,000-seat bull ring, five life-sized dinosaur sculptures, Bonnie and Clyde's bullet-ridden car, 18 wild hippos. Additional development possible."

The Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar's lavish weekend getaway before he was gunned down 13 years ago on the roof of a three-storey safe house in Medellin as he tried to escape from a special police task force. Since then, the Spanish-style Napoles has been ransacked and left in ruins by treasure hunters seeking millions of dollars worth of cocaine loot that many believe is buried on the property. The ranch served as one of the headquarters for Escobar's $22-billion drug business.

The Colombian government, which seized Napoles from Escobar's exiled wife and children, will begin breaking up the property into smaller lots next month. Part of the ranch is intended for a prison housing 1,200 inmates, and there are plans for an anti-crime museum and theme park. Tourists are expected.

"We want to return the property to its golden age and use the name of Pablo Escobar to attract people to it," said Luis Francisco Sanchez, who heads the Puerto Triunfo municipality's plans to develop Napoles, about 320 kilometres from Bogota. Escobar bought the property for $70-million. Construction on the prison may begin as soon as September, Sanchez said.

Occasional cars already turn off the highway from Medellin to Bogota and pass through the entrance gate to Napoles, eager to check out where Colombia's most notorious citizen lived. At the entrance arch, there used to be a small plane -- since stolen -- that Escobar claimed he used to make his first drug run.

The sprawling, L-shaped villa sits at the end of several kilometres of potholed dirt road, within stone walls topped with barbed wire. The white, two-storey house, once "El Patron's" luxury playground, is now gutted and its walls are crumbling. Floors have been dug into and ceramic-covered walls smashed apart. Visitors use the house as a bathroom, perhaps to tell friends they have been to the toilet at Pablo Escobar's.

The bedroom, which overlooks the murky, slime-covered swimming pool, looks like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as trees curl through the windows and up through a gaping hole in the floor. The kitchen has become a favourite of souvenir hunters who pry gaudy green and yellow tiles from where Escobar's staff once prepared food for murderous guests at drug-fuelled parties. Sanchez hopes to attract enough outside investment to rebuild the house.

Escobar, a plump man with longish hair and mustache, started out as a petty thief, later taking advantage of a growing appetite in the United States for cocaine. Credited with blowing an Avianca airliner out of the sky, killing 110 onboard, and orchestrating an attack on Colombia's Supreme Court that left 11 justices dead, Escobar terrorized the country with bomb attacks and thousands of assassinations.

At the height of his drug dealing in the 1980s, Escobar and his associates provided more than half of the cocaine entering the U.S., according to Mark Bowden, author of Killing Pablo, a blow-by-blow account of the joint U.S.-Colombian hunt for Escobar.

Part of the tourist attraction at Napoles would be Escobar's collection of vintage Ford and Porsche cars. One is thought to have been used by notorious gangsters Bonnie and Clyde and now stands rusted and burned out in a massive garage, after revenge by a rival drug cartel.

But the biggest attractions for tourists, other than to fantasize about power and riches in the home of the world's Public Enemy No. 1, are the hippos.

In the 1980s, Escobar imported elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, zebras and two hippos from Africa to graze and wallow at his many manmade lakes. While most of the animals have since died or been transferred to zoos, the hippos, which can grow to 1,800 kilograms, have multiplied to 18.

"They are certainly an attraction, but a potentially dangerous one, if their numbers outgrow the property," Sanchez said. "We will keep a few of them, but the rest will have to go to zoos, locally and internationally."

Martha Cecilia Ocampo, head veterinarian at Parque Zoologico Santa Fe, near Medellin, is worried that the hippos, which kill more people in Africa each year than any other wild animal, have outgrown their habitat. Her park already houses many of Escobar's animals, including two hippos.

"This is a time bomb," Ocampo said. "If the authorities don't do something to rehouse these hippos soon, they will make it to the nearest river, and then people will die. Catching them is extremely difficult."

A short walk from Escobar's house is his party area, complete with Roman columns, where beauty queens and strippers once mingled with assassins and friendly politicians. Now, it's obscured by weeds and the encroaching woodland. He also had a western-style saloon, currently boarded up, with the doors hanging off their hinges.

The stables, which could house as many as 12 horses, is now home to families displaced by Colombia's four-decade war with guerrillas. A dozen or so families live on Escobar's land.

"We just beg the government to let us stay here and not send us back home," said Bellavida Perea Gomez, 44, who fled the western province of Choco a year ago and lives with her daughter and two grandchildren in the stables. Her other daughter was killed by guerrillas.

Among the government's plans is to allow displaced and demobilized paramilitary fighters to develop parts of the land into small farms, Sanchez said. Maracuya fruits, lemons, plantain and corn will be cultivated.

At the bull ring, the only aggressive creatures now are the hundreds of thousands of wasps that cling to hives in the interior of the arena, where his matadors changed into their costumes and bulls waited to be turned loose. One can imagine Escobar and his lieutenants deciding the fate of some poor victim in the ring like a Roman emperor.

Here, the Puerto Triunfo government plans to develop a commercial agricultural show ring for cattle, Sanchez said.

On the dirt road that leads to the main buildings, visitors pass by Escobar's Jurassic park, where he built statues of five prehistoric animals, including a T. Rex and a woolly mammoth. As in the main house, the plaster sculptures have been bashed open with sledge hammers, revealing their metal cages inside, as scavengers searched for hidden money. The government plans to restore the sculptures as a tourist attraction, Sanchez said.

Overlooking the ranch were wooden towers where sentries could scan the horizon and alert Escobar to uninvited guests or aircraft that landed at his international-size runway.

Escobar, once listed by Forbes magazine as the world's seventh-richest man, bought old 727s and stripped out their seats to transport cocaine. The runway, which can be seen from Escobar's house, now will be used for international tourists to land directly at Napoles, Sanchez said.