One Hundred Years of Solitude

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.

José Arcadio Buendía

The founding of Macondo

The beginning

Leaving their old village after a killing, José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula lead a band of settlers across the swamps and found Macondo by a river of clear water, a place at first without death or memory. García Márquez opens in this Edenic dawn, the town young and full of wonder, before the century's weight of repetition and solitude begins to gather.

The opening chapters

inspired by Macondo is García Márquez's invented town, drawn from his birthplace of Aracataca in the Caribbean lowlands of Colombia; it is sited at that real region.

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