A “Macondo Route” has been launched in the north of Colombia to tour the sites of the classic novel One Hundred Years of Solitude by 1982 Nobel Prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
While Macondo itself is a fictional town, the route will seek to promote tourism in the northern Colombian province of Magdalena, where Garcia Marquez was born in 1927.
The overland tour can start with a one-hour ride from the cities of Barranquilla or Santa Marta to the author’s birthplace, Aracataca.
“It is like travelling to the past to reach Macondo and getting to see the various sites in Aracataca,” Magdalena tourism manager Sandra Rubiano told reporters.
“It is an overland tour so that tourist operators and the various hotels can offer it. Along the route, there will be folklore groups, theatre, dance,” she said.
The tour will be done in traditional vehicles known as “chivas,” buses decorated in vivid colours and fashioned so that people can stand up and even dance in them. Visitors will be taken, among other places, to the banana plantations, the Grand Station and the Gabriel Garcia Marquez museum, which opened in March.
These are the sites where the author spent his childhood and teenage years, and they are regarded as having inspired many of his literary creations. While Garcia Marquez settled in Mexico decades ago, he frequently visits his home in the northern Colombian city of Cartagena.
The Garcia Marquez museum features 14 rooms that are characteristic of Colombian Caribbean homes in the first half of the 20th century.
The author’s home on the site was demolished over 40 years ago and reconstruction was based on his account of the house in the 2002 book Living to Tell the Tale and on accounts from the author’s mother, friends and neighbours.
The tour will cost 79,000 Colombian pesos (about 39 dollars) from Santa Marta and 85,000 pesos (about 42 dollars) from Barranquilla. (Deutsche Press-Agentur)