Macondo doesn't exist. With the 2024 OTT TV series adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude capturing audiences globally, the hunt is on once more though.
Even though the novel came to the author like a fever dream spent in seclusion in Mexico, Garcia Marquez hails from the (real) Colombian town of Aracataca. The locals are convinced that Macondo is based on it, even though much to their chagrin, none of them were cast in the Colombian production. The OTT platform company spent days in the town looking for inspiration and scouting potential. Aracataca doesn't feature in the series. Neither does any other known town. It's all fiction.
A few years ago, we headed to our 'Macondo' — the river-facing Colombian town of Santa Cruz de Mompox. On a Garcia Marquez-inspired journey, we had taken the night bus from Bucaramanga reaching Mompox in the morning. We found the town asleep. The intense mugginess hit us almost immediately as we exited the airconditioned bus. And so did the town's infamous mosquitoes.
Unable to sleep on the bus, I had once again returned to the novel that I had attempted to read many times, but never finished. Somewhere halfway, I tend to lose interest, a sense of loss with previously beloved characters stopping me from warming up to the new generation, the similarity in names driving me to desperation. By this time, Macondo also no longer feels as mythical as it once did, as if I have overstayed my welcome, its bubble of magic burst.
Finding our hotel cloaked