One Hundred Years of Solitude: Aracataca and the Banana Coast

The Buendías' story reaches back to Riohacha: in the sixteenth century, according to the novel, the pirate Francis Drake attacked the town, and one reading makes it the birthplace of Macondo's founders, José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán. In their hometown Buendía kills Prudencio Aguilar after a cockfight, and Aguilar's ghost will not leave the couple alone, so they set off on an expedition to a new home. The real Riohacha was raided by Drake in 1596, when he pillaged the city searching for gold and pearls, and García Márquez mentions it in several novels.

Location precision: The story does not pin down the founders' hometown; Riohacha is one reading of it, and the pin marks the town.

After crossing mountains and looking for a new outlet to the sea, the expedition simply stops and settles. The novel's references put Macondo somewhere on the Caribbean coast between the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta and the Sierra Nevada, with no sea coast of its own. Even so, José Arcadio Buendía believes Macondo to be surrounded by water. The Ciénaga Grande is the largest marsh in Colombia, set between the Magdalena River and the Sierra Nevada, and a narrow sandy spit built in the 1950s now separates it from the Caribbean.

Location precision: Macondo is fictional and the novel gives only a region; the pin marks the Ciénaga Grande de Santa Marta.

Gabriel García Márquez was born in Aracataca on 6 March 1927 and raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás Ricardo Márquez Mejía. The house where he spent his childhood inspired him to make Macondo his book's setting, and Macondo is often supposed to draw on Aracataca. He took the name from a sign at a banana plantation nearby. The museum that opened in April 2010 was built from his own description in the memoir Living to Tell the Tale. In 2006 a referendum to rename the town Macondo failed for low turnout.

Visitor guidance: The Casa Museo is a museum in the centre of Aracataca.

Years after the civil war, the railroad arrives in Macondo, bringing new technology and many foreign settlers. An American fruit company sets up a banana plantation outside the town and builds its own segregated village across the river. García Márquez wrote about the real Aracataca station in his books and visited it often as a child. The renovated building is planned as an exhibition hall for photographs by Leo Matiz, another native of Aracataca.

In the novel the strike ends when the company traps the more than three thousand strikers and machine guns them down in the town square. José Arcadio Segundo is the only survivor, and afterwards he finds no evidence that it happened. The real massacre took place on 5 December 1928 in Ciénaga, after a strike that began on 12 November. The true death toll is unknown; García Márquez's figure is around 3000. His grandfather the Colonel refused to stay silent about it. Ciénaga became a Pueblo Patrimonio in 2012.

Location precision: The sources place the shooting in Ciénaga's town square; the pin marks the central plaza, and the novel's own square is fictional.

Visitor guidance: The plaza is in the centre of Ciénaga.

In 1965 García Márquez was driving his family to Acapulco when the beginning of a new book came to him. He turned the car around and drove back home to Mexico City. For the next year and a half he wrote what became One Hundred Years of Solitude, selling his car to keep the family going; he worked at his house there from October 1965. Sudamericana of Buenos Aires published the first edition on 5 June 1967, and the book has sold over 50 million copies.

Location precision: His house is not located in the sources; the pin marks Mexico City only.