Exploring towns that inspired 'One Hundred Years Of Solitude'

Nueva Venecia is located in the coastal lagoons of Ciénaga, which are mentioned in One Hundred Years Of Solitude. — Photos: MANUEL MEYER/dpa

Throughout his life, Gabriel Garcia Marquez resisted a screen adaptation of his best-selling novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude. His seminal masterpiece, which has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, was simply too complex to be filmed, the writer affectionately known as Gabo said.

After his death in 2014, however, the streaming service Netflix was able to convince Garcia Marquez’s children and acquire the film rights. The first half of the 16-part mini series was released on Dec 11, and reviews have been mostly positive.

The novel, published in 1967, tells the story of the Buendia family and “Macondo”, the village they founded, over a period of 100 years.

It’s a multi-layered work, in which true events from Colombian history are mixed with surreal and fantastical events. The novel is considered a prime example of the magical realism literary style.

If you want to understand the author in all his dimensions, you need to get to know the people, their attitude to life, the traditions, the symbols and the culture in Gabo’s home region, the Caribbean region of Colombia, says Melquin Merchan. In particular Aracataca, where the writer was born on March 6, 1927, and where he spent his childhood, says Merchan, 27, who is an artist from Aracataca.

Gabo was born in this house in Aracataca, which is now a museum.

The family home

In the museum of the former telegraph office, where Gabo’s father used to work, Merchan has his paintings on display, some of which are inspired by scenes and characters from Netflix’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude.

“I try to paint like Gabo wrote. His narrative style, the constant mixing of the real and the surreal, it’s very similar to the stories our grandparents told us,” Merchan says.

Aracataca, which is located on the edge of banana plantations and the mountain ranges of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the hot and humid hinterland of Colombia’s Caribbean coastal region, is not a major city. But it’s Gabo’s home and, so say many experts, the inspiration for the magical Macondo.

In Aracataca you can visit Gabo’s birthplace, the church where he was baptised, the school where he learned to read and write.

“Almost all of my work was influenced by the early years of my childhood,” Garcia Marquez once said. He also took the name “Macondo” from a nearby banana farm.

But Gabo always made it clear that Macondo was a fictional place.

Macondo can be found in many places in Colombia’s Caribbean region, and Gabo used them for various scenes and events in his masterpiece.

If you visit Santa Cruz de Mompox, you’ll be immediately reminded of Macondo. In the small town, situated on the Magdalena River, time seems to have stood still.

Spanish architecture

Like the fictional Macondo, Mompox is surrounded by swamps and was isolated for decades, which is why the town has been able to preserve much of its Spanish colonial architecture. It was declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 1995. Much of the old town, built in 1540, is still used for its original purposes.

During the colonial era, Mompox was an important centre of trade for gold from South America. Even today, there are people who practice the traditional art of filigree, a form of intricate metalwork. The finely crafted golden fish made famous by One Hundred Years Of Solitude are from Mompox.

A character in the novel, Colonel Aureliano Buendia, created the fish, before immediately destroying them, only to start again and not be aware of his solitude. Gabo used them as a metaphor for a cry of loneliness. He knew the goldfish and Mompox through his wife Mercedes Barcha, who went to convent school in the town.

In One Hundred Years Of Solitude, the character Colonel Aureliano produced these works of art. Today, you can do the same at Mompox.

It was goldsmith Luis Guillermo Trespalacios who came up with the tiny decorative golden fish in the 1950s. Today, his daughter Flor proudly shows visitors around the small museum, with displays of her father’s first editions and tools. The traditions and historic charm of the place also inspired Garcia Marquez as the setting for his famous novella Chronicle Of A Death Foretold.

For others, the colonial coastal town of Ciénaga is the real Macondo. What is certain is that Gabo’s novel deals with the banana massacre that was carried out here in 1928 by the Colombian government and the United States-owned United Fruit Company against banana plantation workers who were on strike.

A floating Venice

From Cienaga, you can take a boat through the adjacent swamps of the coastal lagoons of the same name, which Gabo also mentions in One Hundred Years Of Solitude. In the middle of this labyrinth of mangrove forests and lagoons is the floating village of Nueva Venecia, or “New Venice”. It’s a magical, fascinating place.

The locals live from fishing. Their colourful wooden houses are built on stilts. There are no roads, and the only way to get around is by boat. The people here don’t have much, but their zest for life and hospitality are overwhelming.

As night falls, the sound of Caribbean drums and washboard instruments interrupt the silence of the village. It’s not a celebration, but an exorcism of a girl that’s supposedly possessed. Witches, demons, superstition – a fantastical, surreal world mixes with the real one, just like in Gabo’s magical realism.

On the other side of the lagoon is the coastal city of Barranquilla, where the writer spent his youth and apprenticeship years as a journalist at El Heraldo. At the time, Barranquilla was a young, wild and fast-growing industrial city. Even today it is at the centre of Colombia’s music and carnival scenes. At the age of 22, Gabo joined a group of young intellectuals in the city, who influenced him in his literary and creative endeavours.

Cartagena is said to have heavily influenced Gabo’s work.

Gabo’s old typewriter

In the last part of his 1967 novel, Macondo is transformed into a town that’s home to Aureliano Babilonia, one of the last surviving members of the Buendía family. Aureliano meets with Alvaro, German, Alfonso and Gabriel every afternoon. It’s a clear reference to Barranquilla and the group of artists who met regularly at the La Cueva restaurant, where you can still find old photos of the group and Gabo’s old typewriter.

The nearby city of Cartagena de Indias served as a backdrop for Gabo’s novel Love In The Time of Cholera. But the coastal metropolis where he spent his final years in Colombia can also be found in the pages of One Hundred Years Of Solitude. The Caribbean flair, the pastel-coloured colonial houses, balconies decorated with tropical flowers, dreamy courtyards – Cartagena’s lively old town enchanted Garcia Marquez from the beginning.

“The city influenced his work like no other place on Earth,” says Orlando Oliveros from the New Journalism Foundation, set up by Gabo himself.

Gabo, who died in Mexico City, wanted part of his ashes to be buried in Cartagena. They are buried under a bust that’s in the courtyard of the former La Merced convent, which now houses the local university.

Macondo remains a fictional place, but it is everywhere and within us, as the people of the Colombian Caribbean say. – Manuel Meyer/dpa