There had been many attempts to bring One hundred years of solitude to the audiovisual, but it was not until Netflix decided to turn it into the series that is now being released, that we will be able to enjoy the first official adaptation of the novel.
We fly to the Colombian Caribbean to tour the town that inspired its history. A place where we will understand how the emblematic house where the writer was born or the figure of his grandparents played a fundamental role in the work that reinvented the way of narrating in Latin America.
And the characters and anecdotes that accompanied him there, mixed with his imagination, show that magical realism was not only present among his lines, but in his way of creating and in his own life.
Road to Macondo
The most feasible way to get to García Márquez’s hometown is the road that begins on the Caribbean coast, in a place called Ciénaga. This route, he said years later, would inspire one of the most famous places in literature:
The train made a stop at a station without a town, and shortly afterward it passed in front of the only banana farm on the road that had the name written on the portal: Macondo. This word had caught my attention since my first trips with my grandfather.
Like the Macondo of One hundred years of loneliness, To the east “was the impenetrable mountain range,” Santa Marta, “and on the other side of the mountain range the ancient city of Riohacha. To the south were the swamps, covered with an eternal vegetal cream, and the vast universe of the large swamp.
He Official Macondo20 kilometers from his native Aracataca, would remain in his mind as an imaginary place, almost non-existent, from which he would take its name. But although there are similarities between that jungle village, lost in the middle of nowhere, owned by the United Fruit Company, and the literary Macondo, there is something that no one doubts. Aracataca would inspire the Buendía house, which was none other than where Gabo was born: his grandparents’ house.
The town that gave life to the eternal myth
Aracataca today is far from that exuberant place, full of alchemy and paranormal events that the novel recounts. Upon arrival, we are greeted by stifling heat. accompanies us a uniformed man who introduces himself as Colonel Buendía. Mining engineer, lover of military history, actor and cartoonist are some of the many facets of his life. He proudly wears the striped uniform, has prepared different maps and plans of the municipality himself, and denies technology, which he blames for keeping young people away from literature.
Before touring together the most iconic places in the book, he confesses that the figure of the writer is not widely recognized here: “The majority of Colombian tourists are from the capital, that is where they value him the most.” He himself was not aware of his fame until, while working in Bogotá, a boss began to call him Gabo because he was from Aracataca. Many things would still happen before he decided to make a living paying homage to him.
Aracataca had been founded in 1885 – forty years before Gabo’s birth – when a group of settlers arrived in search of rubber and wood. There they would settle after the Thousand Days War, with the country devastated, the camps of the United Fruit Company, the banana company of One hundred years of loneliness.
The mud and cane houses can only be seen in the murals because, very soon, the banana boom arrived and the explosion of crops brought with it foreign influences. Cinema would come from France. From Italy, fashion. From Germany, the pharmaceutical companies, and from England, part of the infrastructure. Gabo would drink from all of this.
The innocent yellow train that had to take so many uncertainties and evidence, and so many praises and misfortunes, and so many changes, calamities and nostalgia, to Macondo
‘One hundred years of solitude’
— Gabriel Garcia Marquez
In the old railway stationin operation today, we can see the famous yellow train that crosses Aracataca, no longer loaded with bananas but with coal extracted from Santa Marta.
From the birth of Gabo to magical realism
In this house, today recreated with furniture from the period, Gabriel García Márquez lived until his grandfather’s death. A colonel from the liberal army retired after the War of a Thousand Days, a guajiro from Riohacha who, like Colonel Buendía, would fight in many wars and win none. That man would serve as the inspiration for one of the most memorable characters in One hundred years of loneliness or the protagonist of The colonel has no one to write to himsince he also waited to receive a pension as a war veteran until the last day of his life.
But it was not until, years later, García Márquez returned there to sell it that he realized the literary value of his childhood. Memories of much of what happened here would become his fourth and most famous novel.
Her grandmother Tranquilina Iguarán, who inspired the character of Úrsula Iguarán, instilled in her that way of narrating fantasy integrated with everyday life. Tranquilina, like Úrsula, also spoke with the dead. He recounted paranormal events without distinguishing them from the rest of the things that happened to him, mixing reality and fiction, something that García Márquez sought to convert into a literary style.
It is also believed that Tranquilina had Galician ancestors, so the stories about spirits and meigas could well have been the germ of magical realism.
In this small room, his grandfather was with liberal politicians, war veterans and generals like Rafael Uribe Uribe. Many of the war stories that appear in the work come from the conversations that Gabo heard here, where he could only access because he was his grandfather’s favorite.
Next to his grandfather’s office, García Márquez drew on the wall that had been painted white so that the boy could use it as a canvas. Here, I would speak openly about the Banana Massacre which happened when, in 1928, striking workers at the United Fruit Company were murdered by the Colombian government.
After the event, large quantities of bananas were left unpicked and the plants decomposed, giving rise, we are told, to hundreds of yellow butterflies.
Although no one knows for sure how many were killed in the massacre, the data that has gone down in history is the 3,000 that Gabriel García Márquez mentions in the novel.
Next to the main house, right behind the one that some confuse with the century-old chestnut tree on the other side of the door, lived the house staff. Three indigenous people of the Wayuu ethnic group who inspired Cataure and Visitación, who alerts Úrsula about the plague of insomnia.
Beyond the Buendía house
A few meters from his birth home, we find The Telegraphist’s House, now converted into a museum, which would bring the writer’s father to work in Aracataca. Here, he would meet the daughter of a retired colonel who did not seem like a good match. The first, because he had a conservative ideology, the second, because he had a job that was not very well paid, and the third, because of the reputation as a womanizer that preceded him.
After a story full of Morse code messages that inspired Love in the time of cholerahis father requested the transfer and his mother and he got married in secret. Shortly after, Gabriel García Márquez would be born, for whom his grandfather felt such affection that he asked him to stay and live with them and baptize him Gabriel José de la Concordia for bringing peace to his family.
References to the life and work of García Márquez are present in many of the corners of this place where tourists arrive in dribs and drabs. From street vendors with stalls full of yellow butterflies to the street tribute that fills the murals of the Paseo Lineal, sculptures such as that of Remedios la Bella, the church where the writer was baptized or the tomb of Melquíades where nightly processions honor the first person in die (and several times) in the town of Macondo.
Macondo, the town that is reborn again
Before dying, García Márquez left these three conditions to adapt his novel: that it be filmed in Colombia, in Spanish and with the necessary hours to follow the seven generations of the Buendía lineage.
When we talk in town about it, the feeling is bittersweet. Netflix decided to film some parts in La Guajira, others in César, Cundinamarca and in this region of Magdalena, but not in Aracataca. “They didn’t want to record here. They said that there was not enough infrastructure, but what about when they record in the middle of the desert? “There are no infrastructures either, right?” the Colonel complains, without being aware that many of these films are recorded in Ouarzazate, a Moroccan city next to the desert that houses enormous film studios.
It was almost 1,000 kilometers south of the banana region where the team decided to recreate the setting of the series.
Six years later – more than three dedicated to the script – they announced one of the most ambitious projects in Latin American audiovisuals, they would still need 25 weeks and 200 workers to create the first version of the set filming. One with representations of the architectural history of Colombia (from mud and cane houses to the colonial style and republican architecture) and 16,000 different plants brought from the Caribbean that are mixed with the powerful imagination of the Nobel Prize.
Perhaps they have managed to make that Macondo also have the sweet and penetrating smell of ripe bananas. It may even smell like the jasmine that perfumed the patios of the houses, but not like a laborer’s sweat or stagnant river water. So far from Guajira and the War of a Thousand Days, sadness is not felt.
There, where there is no jungle or monsoon rains and there is no certainty that García Márquez stopped, there is only the legacy of that imaginary world that confuses, once again, what is real and what is fictitious.
#Trip #Macondo #tour #settings #Years #Solitude
