Gabriel García Márquez, the acclaimed Colombian novelist who passed away in April 2014, never saw his stories as magical as others believed. Amused by the praise for his inventiveness, he once remarked: “The truth is that there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality… the problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination.”
Could there be a better advertisement for his homeland? The Colombian Ministry of Tourism doesn’t think so — it adopted “Colombia, Magical Realism” as its slogan, borrowing from the literary style Márquez helped define. If your trip planning to Colombia includes exploring the landscapes and towns that inspired his novels, now is the perfect time. Once off-limits to all but the most adventurous travelers, Colombia is once again proud to share its magic. But where should you go to truly understand the man many consider the greatest writer of his era?
Growing up in Aracataca
Many of Márquez’s stories (including One Hundred Years of Solitude, for which he won the Nobel Prize) are set in the fictional town of Macondo, a hamlet that rises to prosperity through its banana plantations and then declines into a desolate, ghost town crippled by nostalgia and melancholy. Aracataca, where Márquez spent his early childhood, was the model for Macondo; his acknowledgment is quoted in a mural outside the town that states: “I returned one day and discovered that in between reality and nostalgia was the raw material of my work”.
Located around 80km south of Santa Marta in Colombia's northern parts, Aracataca doesn’t yet offer much for the visitor, although the house where Márquez was born and raised by his grandparents is now a simple museum with excerpts from his books, and you can visit the school he attended, the train station that bought in the banana workers, and a statue of Remedios the Beauty (a character from One Hundred Years of Solitude).