Gabriel García Márquez, the acclaimed Colombian novelist who died in April 2014, never considered his stories as magical as others supposed. Amused that he was always praised for his inventiveness, he once said: “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 advert for his homeland? The Colombian Ministry of Tourism doesn’t think so: it’s adopted “Colombia, Magical Realism” as the slogan for its promotion abroad, borrowing from the literary style attributed to Márquez. And in the wake of his death, more and more readers captivated by his fiction will be heading to Colombia, once off-limits to all but the most adventurous of travellers but now proud to show its magic again. So where best to go, if you’re looking to understand the man whom many considered to be the greatest writer of his age, and his works?
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).