Almost six decades ago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez believe Macondo from ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ like the setting of one of the classic novels of magical realism. Thanks to his audacity to create stories deep in meaning and his unmatched narrative style that challenges the understanding of reality, the Colombian author and journalist was a leading figure of the genre, and this masterpiece of literature was his most praised work.

In 1982 received the Nobel Prize in Literature for an adventure that began many years ago, when he was driving on the roads of Acapulco, Mexico, to vacation with his family, but, suddenly, he abandoned the trip and returned to his native Colombia, because he had an epiphany about a story that would put Latin America on the world literary map: the Buendía family tree.

It all starts with José Arcadio Buendía, who founded Macondoan isolated town where seven generations of his family will live while his home begins to gain visibility and, with this, becomes the target of repeated calamities very similar to the history of several Latin American places.

Magical realism is distinguished by telling fictions objectively and real events in a distorted way. In this case, Macondo serves as a mythical space fused with the reality of Colombia. Furthermore, the characters never completely die, as they are reincarnated in one way or another in the following generations, giving way to a key characteristic of this work that serves as a critique of the post-colonial history of Latin America: the vice of falling again and again into the same socio-political conflicts.

García Márquez’s maternal grandparents They were the greatest influence in creating his novel. On the one hand, Nicolás Ricardo Márquez was a decorated veteran of the Thousand Days War, who told him about the revolt against the conservative Colombian government and thus motivated him to lean towards socialism. Meanwhile, Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes was a superstitious woman from whom she learned about magic and mysticism. They lived in a house located in Aracataca, Magdalena, and their grandson spent much of his childhood there without knowing that it would be his main source of inspiration to create Macondo from ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’.