Love in the Time of Cholera

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.

Fermina Daza

Catedral de Santa Catalina de Alejandría

Part 2

The cathedral anchors the devout, respectable society into which Fermina Daza marries Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Its Mass and its social calendar mark the world of order and status that Florentino's patient love has to outlast.

Part 2

inferred The novel's cathedral is not named, but the walled city's only cathedral is Santa Catalina, and literary tours of García Márquez's Cartagena place the church scenes here.

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Florentino Ariza

Portal de los Escribanos, Plaza de los Coches

Part 2

Under this colonnade of public scribes, Florentino Ariza sets down words of love for strangers who cannot write their own. The arcade turns his own thwarted longing into a trade, and the letters become the novel's currency of feeling.

Part 2

inferred The arcade where the young Florentino writes letters is unnamed in the text; guides to García Márquez's Cartagena identify it with the real Portal de los Escribanos on the Plaza de los Coches, the historic gathering place of the city's public scribes.

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