García Márquez Heads Home to Macondo

For the first time in more than two decades, Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez is returning to his hometown which he immortalized as Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

García Márquez was yesterday travelling into Aracataca, the real name of the town near Colombia's northern coast, on the inaugural trip of the "Macondo Express" decorated with yellow butterflies that have come to symbolize Macondo.

The town was festooned with yellow balloons, with school children ready to greet Aracataca's most famous son at the station.

It would be the first time in 25 years that García Márquez has been to Aracataca, where he was born 79 years ago. The author has said he based the village in One Hundred Years of Solitude, which was published 40 years ago, on Aracataca.

García Márquez set out from the coastal city of Santa Marta with an entourage of local business leaders and politicians on the train that will run regularly through sleepy towns and banana plantations to the author's hometown as a tourist attraction, to be known as "Macondo Route".

"With this launch we hope to relive that era that García Márquez narrates in his books, especially in One Hundred Years of Solitude," said acting governor of Magdalena province, Sandra Rubiano Layton.

The house in Aracataca where the Nobel Prize winner spent his first eight years with his maternal grandparents is now a museum. "I feel that all my writing has been about the experiences of the time I spent with my grandparents," García Márquez once wrote.

García Márquez lives in Mexico but keeps a home near Aracataca, in Cartagena.