Mapped
Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez never names the Caribbean port of the novel, but readers and scholars identify it as Cartagena de Indias, with touches of Barranquilla and the Magdalena River. The walled colonial city, its cathedral and its seafront arcades supply the streets where Florentino Ariza waits half a century for Fermina Daza.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
In the town of Macondo, founded in the Caribbean lowlands by José Arcadio Buendía, seven generations of the Buendía family live out a century of love, war, invention and solitude, from the wonder of the founding to the apocalyptic wind that erases the town. García Márquez's Macondo is drawn from his own Aracataca in coastal Colombia, and its history mirrors the region's: the wandering gypsies, the endless civil wars, the banana company and its massacre, and the long rains that close the book.
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The General in His Labyrinth
Gabriel García Márquez
The last months of Simón Bolívar, in 1830, as the sick and disillusioned Liberator makes his final journey out of Bogotá and down the Magdalena River toward the sea and death, his dream of a united Spanish America in ruins. García Márquez follows the real route: the descent from Bogotá to the river port of Honda, the long boat journey down the great Magdalena, the colonial town of Mompox, and the hacienda at Santa Marta where he dies.
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