Aracataca, Colombia – Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez returned Wednesday for the first time in a quarter- century to his birthplace and inspiration for the fictional town Macondo, immortalized in “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”
García Márquez traveled to Aracataca by train, part of a new passenger service Colombians hope will carry legions of literary pilgrims. Staring out of a train window at the hubbub, he said to those around him: “Look at this. … And they say that I invented Macondo, that I invented magical realism,” said his friend Jaime Abello.
Joining him on the trip were some 300 passengers, including his family members, entertainers and Colombia’s culture minister.
He and his wife Mercedes Barcha toured the town in a horse and carriage, passing by the main library and the home where he was raised by his grandparents. For his 80th birthday in March, Colombia’s government pledged $500,000 to reconstruct the decrepit home, now a museum.
The Mexico City resident last visited his hometown in 1983, a year after winning the Nobel Prize for literature. Like many of Colombia’s famous sons and daughters, the writer, 80, lives at a safe distance from the nation’s four-decade-old armed conflict.
Last year, residents voted in a referendum to change the town’s name to “Aracataca-Macondo,” but high absenteeism invalidated the results.
