Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ tells the intergenerational tale of the Buendia family over the course of a century. Based on the book of the same name by Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, the series brings to life the many trials and tribulations faced by the family, with all the events unfolding in the town they founded. Called Macondo, the town starts as a solitary one, but as it becomes more and more connected to the world, it welcomes war, strife, and massacre, all of which resemble the things that actually happened in Colombia’s history. Does this mean that Macondo, too, has been borrowed from reality in an otherwise fictional tale?
Macondo is a Fictional Place in Gabriel García Márquez’s Book
Macondo is a fictional town created by Gabriel García Márquez for his seminal novel that charts the course of the Buendia family. In his autobiography, ‘Living to Tell the Tale,’ the writer revealed that he got the name “Macondo” from a sign that he saw at a banana plantation near his hometown. It is also the name of a tree that grows in rainforests. While its presence in ‘One Hundred of Years of Solitude’ made it famous, the town has also appeared in other writings of the author.
While it is a made-up town, it is believed that García Márquez modeled it on Aracataca. The author’s hometown is located in a way that is similar to the one described in his novel. The influence of the real-life town on the fictional Macondo seems to be such that in 2006, a proposal was made to change Aracataca’s name to Macondo, though the proposal was eventually rejected. In honor of García Márquez, the Gabo Foundation and the Santo Domingo Foundation have created the Macondo Route, where tourists can take a tour around the author’s town and witness the locations that have served as inspiration for not just Macondo but other towns that have featured in García Márquez’s works over the years.
The Netflix Production Created Real Towns to Film the Series
When it comes to bringing García Márquez’s creation to life on the screen, Netflix left no stone unturned. Eugenio Caballero and Bárbara Enríquez were brought on board to design the sets, and Alvarado, near Ibagué, in Colombia, was chosen as the place where Macondo would be built. The production team ended up building three human-scale towns, with a real Buendia house, a marketplace, and other shops that appear frequently in the show. Of the three, one town is the place that appears in the first episode of the series as the hometown of Jose Arcadio Buendia and Úrsula Iguarán, which they leave following their wedding and a murder that haunts them for the rest of their lives.
The other two sets present different stages of Macondo. The first one is from the time when Macondo is founded, and Jose Arcadio Buendia and Úrsula Iguarán, along with the rest of their group, decide to lay down their roots in the place. The set consisted of thatched huts and unpaved roads, serving as the place where the first few episodes are filmed. The second set got more elaborate as it had to be an evolved version of Macondo. It was reportedly built over the course of a year by more than two hundred workers, who were building it up in tandem with the development of the town in the story. The set designers were extremely conscious of the historical setting, so they built the town so that it would exhibit its evolution not just through better roads and electricity but also through the architecture of the buildings.
The most important part of the town is the Buendia house itself, which is considered a character of its own in the story. It reportedly took twenty-five weeks to build the first version of the house. As the story picks up, we find Ursula expanding the house over the years, and the set designers worked alongside the filming crew to reflect that change in the house. This meant that as the characters moved through their arcs and grew up, the house grew up with them, and by the time the story of the Buendias comes to an end, we see a marked change in the house as well.
Read More: One Hundred Years of Solitude: Are the Buendias Based on a Real Family?
