Horacio Oliveira, in Paris, spends his nights walking the city with the Maga and the Club de la Serpiente, until a baby's death breaks the group apart. Then the novel moves to Buenos Aires: a circus, a psychiatric clinic and a window over a courtyard.
The route follows the book's real Paris places, from the Pont des Arts to the Montparnasse cemetery, then its Buenos Aires scenes. Most Paris stops come from the Rutas Cervantes literary route; the Buenos Aires ones are invented and unpinned.
Jorge Luis Borges is the writer who turned a library into a metaphor for the universe, yet his own life ran through very real places in Buenos Aires: a poor Palermo childhood, a basement library job, and eighteen years as director of the National Library.
This route follows him from his birthplace barrio and a famous café to the two library buildings he knew, with one fictional stop: the Calle Garay house where "The Aleph" sees everything at once.
Before The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew the mail. He flew the Aéropostale line from Toulouse, ran the Cape Juby airfield, directed an airline in Buenos Aires and survived a crash in the Sahara that later fed his most famous book.
The route follows his life in the air, from the take-off strip at Montaudran to the sea off Marseille where his plane was found. The Sahara crash site is only an educated guess.
Macondo is not on any map, but its author grew up on Colombia's Caribbean coast. Gabriel García Márquez was raised in Aracataca by grandparents who treated the extraordinary as perfectly natural, and that deadpan voice became the novel.
The route runs from Riohacha, where the Buendías begin, through the marsh and sierra country around Macondo to the railway, the banana company and the massacre, and ends in Mexico City, where the book was written. Macondo itself is fictional, so its stops are real stand-ins.
In January 1952 Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student from Buenos Aires, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist, set off to cross South America on an old 1939 Norton 500 they called La Poderosa, "The Mighty One". The bike died in Chile, and they went on by truck, steamer, raft, horse and on foot — some 8,000 kilometres in about nine months, ending at a leper colony on the Amazon and in Caracas.
Guevara's diary of the trip, published decades later as The Motorcycle Diaries, records how poverty, exploited miners and the lepers they worked with changed him; within a few years he was "Che", a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The route follows the journey from both men's accounts as summarised by historians.
