Visit Aracataca, a short ride from Santa Marta, where Gabo acolytes can take the pilgrimage to see the birthplace of Gabriel García Márquez.
Photo © Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Magical and utterly compelling, the realist fictions of Gabriel García Márquez transformed the literary culture of an entire continent.
To read Márquez is to be immersed in the omens, tropical sensuality, family histories, and magic of the Caribbean Coast.
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, impassioned readers can invariably call to mind the time and place that Márquez’s fantastical prose first cast its spell.
Just a 90-minute bus ride from Santa Marta, the down-at-heel town of Aracataca, where Márquez was born in 1927, has become a place of pilgrimage for Gabo acolytes.
The town provided the inspiration for the fictional town of Macondo in Márquez’s revered masterpiece, Cien Años de Soledad.
With blistering heat year round, dilapidated buildings that date to Aracataca’s early 20th-century glory years, kids climbing trees and scampering in the river, the whole town feels like a mirage.
Nowadays, the banana groves that filled the coffers of American banana companies have been replaced by palm oil plantations.
Certainly, Aracataca is far from a tourist carousel, which is both its salvation and its damnation. A dusty, haunted town, selling out hasn’t been an option. Any efforts to fabricate tourist hotspots and slap on a Márquez placard have failed due to the town’s pitiful infrastructure and excruciating poverty.
Still, the earthy town is a worthy stop on the Márquez trail and, along with Mompox, it’s an intriguing place where the ordinary and the extraordinary coalesce and myth trumps reason at every turn.
As far as sights go, the most compelling Márquez ‘attraction’ in Aracataca is the Casa Museo Gabriel García Márquez, the home where Márquez was born in 1927 and raised by his grandparents, which has been faithfully reconstructed as a museum.
Evocative period furnishings and memorabilia relate Gabo’s novels to his upbringing (he lived in Aracataca until 1936), and formative years. Márquez’s political leanings were heavily influenced by his grandfather, a colonel who fought in the Thousand Days War.
But, it was his grandmother that inspired his magical realist proclivities. In their home, surrounded by a colorful cast of relatives, random guests, servants, and Wayúu Indians, the young Gabo was mesmerized by her supernatural orations.
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