One evening in June 1965, a tired Gabriel García Márquez returned to his hotel after a full day as a screenwriter on the set of a film outside of Mexico City. A young couple was waiting to speak with him.

Gabo, as he’s commonly known in Latin America, was then in his late 30s and had published four books, but his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude, was a few years away. He had been mulling over the premise for a long time, and his confidence in the novel was unshakable. He had told his younger brother, Gustavo, that he would one day write a book that would be read more than Don Quixote, and after his wedding he told his wife, Mercedes, not to worry about money because at 40, he would publish a novel the entire world would know. He did. Now, 57 years after its publication, Netflix is making the first true adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude for a series due later this year. “The García Márquez fund is very healthy,” says Pilar Reyes, editorial director of Penguin Random House in Spain. But back in 1965, Gabo was still an impoverished writer, even if well regarded among Latin American bibliophiles. He was living in Mexico City with his wife and two young sons. He was a chain-smoking transplant from the Colombian Caribbean who earned a living writing copy for an advertising agency (which he hated doing), with the occasional screenwriting gig (which he much preferred). As the two strangers asking to interview him were about to discover, his ability to tell a captivating tale was already in full force in those drudging days.

The couple—a German interpreter named Barbara Dohmann and the Chilean-born writer Luis Harss—had been commissioned by Harper & Row to interview Latin American writers for a book introducing their work to a Stateside audience. Gabo, delighted at the prospect, began to tell them a story. “He literally came to our room, lay on our bed, smoked cigarette after cigarette and just talked,” Dohmann, who went on to a successful career as a British barrister, told me last year in London. Later, when she read his next novel, Dohmann realized she had listened to Gabo tell the story of One Hundred Years of Solitude firsthand.

A Spanish writer-actor named María Luisa Elío remembered being floored by Gabo’s loquaciousness too. She and her husband, Jomí García Ascot, were part of the large group of exiles after the Spanish Civil War and were introduced to Gabo through writers and filmmakers that he hung out with. “We went to lunch and he told me about a priest who levitated, and I believed him,” Elío said in 2001, when I asked why the great novelist had dedicated the novel to her and her husband. “After we were left alone and he told me the entire book, I said to him: ‘If you write this, you will be writing the Bible.’ ”

From the Archive : 50 Years of Solitude

Gabo attempted to tackle One Hundred Years of Solitude in the early 1950s, on rolls of paper he took from the newspaper where he worked as a struggling reporter in Barranquilla, Colombia. He lived in a hotel alongside ladies of the night, because the rent was cheap, and loved to tell people how the prostitutes let him borrow their soap. When Gabo finally finished writing the story of “a tropical town called Macondo that doesn’t appear in any map,” as Harss called it, he sent the manuscript to the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes. It was a monstrous tome, or “mamotreto,” as Gabo referred to it. When Fuentes read the last page, he wrote to his friend to say that the novel’s magnificence had left him “crushed.”

One Hundred Years was published in June 1967 in Argentina. Legend has it that when its first print run of 10,000 copies sold out in the region in three weeks, Gabo asked the publisher to send him his royalties in cash so he and his family could feel more viscerally that what was happening was real. Three years later, when the book was published in the United States, The New York Times called it a South American Genesis. Gabo won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982. In Latin America he has since reached godlike status.

I came to know Gabo’s work because I was born in Barranquilla, the port city where he worked as a reporter, and my childhood was imbued with the same exuberant spirit and storytelling that powered his work. I met him in 1995 when I was a freelance journalist in New York and applied to a writing workshop he was giving in Cartagena. It was three unforgettable days, during which he advised us that our goal as storytellers was to grip readers entirely: “Writing is a hypnotic act.” I noticed how much Gabo liked to name-drop—Fidel Castro had once eaten 18 scoops of ice cream in front of him—but I was most struck by how much he reminded me of my own family. I was in awe of the way he had turned the humdrum daily experiences of Caribbean life into a literary kingdom with universal heft.

Did Gabo manage to write Latin America’s Don Quixote? “It is a groundbreaking work of art,” says Gene Bell-Villada, coeditor of the Oxford Handbook of Gabriel García Márquez. To which his editing partner, Ignacio López-Calvo, adds: “This book is actually the embodiment of world literature, circulating worldwide, being translated to so many languages, and being appreciated and imitated by so many readers and writers throughout the world.” It still has hold. Last fall Dua Lipa posted a photo of herself holding the novel. “It’s irresistible,” she wrote.

Before One Hundred Years, few had heard the term magical realism. Now it’s routinely used to evoke the literature of a whole continent. Gabo’s formula, which took about 17 years to cook, mixed Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the Spanish Chronicles of the Indies with Faulkner and Hemingway. He overlaid the techniques of his literary masters onto stories that he collected firsthand, especially from the first eight years of his life, when he lived with his grandparents in Aracataca, a backward town that had experienced the wars, booms, and busts that he went on to describe in his imaginary Macondo. Latin American writers have lived with the shadow of García Márquez and of magical realism ever since. Writers like Isabel Allende and Laura Esquivel were greatly influenced by him. Others, like Chilean writer Alberto Fuguet and the Mexican writer Jorge Volpi, overtly rejected his influence and defied admonitions that if their novels didn’t feature flying grandmothers, they had no chance of being published in the United States.

The label has proven impossible to dodge. “I write realism,” the novelist Guadalupe Nettel tells me on the phone from Mexico City. One of her short stories is about a family that eats insects to reverse a curse, so reviewers refer to her work as magical realism. “But I write it as realism,” she says. “In Mexico, we have these customs. Still, in the US, they call ‘magical realism’ whatever they can’t label.”

García Márquez’s near-mythical ascent from a nobody born in a remote Colombian town to the world’s most widely read Spanish-language writer is filled with all kinds of lore. Some of the mythmaking was instigated by Gabo himself: He had a mischievous desire to inflate his own story as if it were one of his fictions. As he wrote in a wry note to Fuentes: “I was no savior when it came to Mexican film. But I do believe I can be of much help in our efforts to bring Latin American novels to the world.”

With its lavish two-part 16-episode adaptation, Netflix hopes to introduce new audiences to the saga of the seven generations of the doomed Buendía family and their eccentric, wild, passionate, corrupt, innocent, voluble, incestuous, beautiful, sad, and often mad lives in Macondo.

It’s a momentous (and risky) endeavor. I ask Francisco Ramos, Netflix’s VP of Latin American content and godfather of the project, if One Hundred Years will be a tropical version of two other hit series centered around families, Game of Thrones and The Crown. “Well,” he tells me via video call from Mexico City without missing a beat, “the Buendías are certainly more fun than the Windsors.” The raw material is all there. As García Márquez knew so well, the hard part lies in the execution.

Gabo always loved film. His eldest son, Rodrigo García Barcha, himself a writer-director of films, recalls his father’s love for Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard, Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, and Alain Resnais’s Providence, to name a few. He also loved Sam Peckinpah and had a soft spot for the Italian neorealists. García Barcha remembers that when he was in his early teens, his parents took him to see Last Tango in Paris and The Story of Adele H.

By the ’70s, after Gabo had become relatively wealthy, he spent a lot of time and money on the moving image. He was involved in TV production in Colombia, wrote scripts, and helped set up a film school in Cuba, where he gave screenwriting workshops. Fernando Restrepo, his partner in the Colombian venture, once told me that Gabo tried to set up a film production company that he planned to call Solitude & Company, which I later borrowed for the title of an oral history I wrote about his life.

Two of his most beloved works—Chronicle of a Death Foretold and Love in the Time of Cholera—have been turned into movies, but neither did the novels justice. The former, directed by Francesco Rosi, played like a misguided Italian operetta. The latter, directed by Mike Newell, was cartoonish and overdramatized and starred non-Colombian actors who spoke in English in the lead roles. “Truly awful,” López-Calvo says by email of many of the adaptations, adding that he thinks the small screen will suit the novel well. “A TV series seems ideal today for such a complex and sophisticated work. And television series have changed dramatically in recent years…. Perhaps Gabo would’ve been okay with it today, who knows!”

López-Calvo is referring to the fact that Gabo never wanted his most famous book to be made into a film, preferring readers to imagine the characters for themselves. He said it would take 100 hours to tell the story properly, and that the only way he could even begin to conceive of an acceptable adaptation was if it were in Spanish and shot in Colombia.

But in truth, Gabo said many things, and often they were purposefully contradictory. He loved hanging out with Hollywood stars—he visited Robert Redford at the Sundance Institute, and Francis Ford Coppola once cooked pasta at his house in Havana—even as he declined to sell the rights to his masterwork to luminaries including William Friedkin, Werner Herzog, and Dino De Laurentis. There is, however, an obscure Japanese adaptation from 1981. Shortly after Gabo’s death in 2014, I asked his agent, the legendary Carmen Balcells, if there would ever be a true and full adaptation of the novel. Her answer was absolute: “He never wanted a film made of One Hundred Years. And even today it’s a desire respected by his family—which I think will be upheld forever.” His children have a different recollection of their father’s wishes. “He was always a little tempted to make the books into movies,” says García Barcha, but “he said no so many times that the offers disappeared.”

Gabo’s widow, Mercedes, died in 2020, so now all decisions are in the hands of García Barcha and his brother, Gonzalo. “Gabo said to us that once he was dead, we could do whatever we wanted,” García Barcha says. “ ‘Just don’t bother me.’ ” Such a proclamation sounds to me like the lapidary phrases that Gabo would give to one of his characters. The author’s son follows up with one of his own: “It is the living that have to make decisions.”

The brothers have been criticized in some quarters for allowing the Netflix adaptation and for the recent publication of Until August, an unfinished novel that Gabo, already suffering from advanced dementia, had ordered to be destroyed. The book has had mixed reviews: mostly glowing and respectful in Colombia, terrible in the United States. “When I read that we are being greedy, I feel sad for a few minutes, but ultimately these are the decisions we have to make,” says García Barcha.

In 2018, Ramos, who had just been appointed to his new post at Netflix, was ready to take the streamer’s Latin American offerings to another level. Netflix’s philosophy of going local had already proven effective worldwide: The Crown is British. Squid Game is South Korean. Money Heist is Spanish. The House of Flowers is Mexican. It was time to replicate this formula in South American countries. (Narcos takes place in Colombia and Mexico, but it’s a Netflix US production.) The idea of adapting One Hundred Years started to float around in corporate meetings, and it stuck. Ramos ran with it—but first he had to negotiate with Mercedes, who was still part of the estate’s decision-making at the time. Gabo’s family demanded that the series be as long as the story required, that it be in Spanish, and that it be filmed in Colombia. Gabo’s sons came on board as executive producers.

Macondo was built near Ibagué, a town in the Andes. It’s far from the Caribbean, but it has a similar mountainous topography to the area around Aracataca, where the foothills of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta cascade into the sea. Eugenio Caballero (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Bárbara Enríquez (Roma) have designed the sets, so Macondo-in-the-Andes promises to be gorgeous. On set, as in the novel, Macondo transforms from a settlement of straw-roofed huts for 20 families into a full-blown town. It’s all been built in human scale. You can walk around the Buendía house, the pharmacy, the bar, and the market.

Some of Gabo’s most ardent fans will be wary of seeing characters that have lived in their imaginations for the last six decades. “I don’t want Netflix to tell me what Colonel Aureliano Buendía looks like,” says Colombian-born Gustavo Arango, a professor of literature and author of two books about García Márquez. “I’ve always imagined he looks like my grandfather. As every Colombian has.”

But when I’m shown some early footage in Bogotá, I enjoy seeing those faces in locations that, to me, seem out of a biblical Colombia. I recognize the arrival of Melquíades, the gypsy who disturbs the idyllic hamlet when he appears with his impressive magnet and his magnifying glass; and the advent of Rebeca, the child that eats earth with her hands. I enjoy the anger with which the Buendía patriarch receives the government official who comes to his front door thinking he can tell the people of Macondo what to do. The costumes are elaborate, every detail perfectly curated. The actors all have amazing faces. There are no stars in the production, although many are respected local actors, including Claudio Cataño as Colonel Aureliano Buendía, Marleyda Soto as the older Úrsula Iguarán, and Diego Vásquez as the older José Arcadio Buendía. The nonactors prepared by attending theater workshops.

Like the novel, the One Hundred Years series is sparing with dialogue. “It’s certainly not Succession,” says Alex García López, the principal director, on a video call from Barcelona. (Some of the one-liners I hear are memorable, however: When Úrsula Iguarán gives birth to her first child, “he is born with women’s buttocks.”) García López also tells me that the series won’t be like the “phantasmagorical Harry Potter when a ghost shows up and there’s a halo and the music goes up.” That answers the magical realism question: Netflix isn’t interested in flashy (and expensive) special effects.

The directing is split between two Latin Americans. García López was born in Argentina and has ample experience working on big American productions, including a few Marvel series. The other director is Colombian-born writer-director Laura Mora, who has a long-standing relationship with Netflix and whose films, The Kings of the World and Killing Jesus, have earned festival acclaim. The directors’ styles couldn’t be more different. García López is vertiginous—“I wanted a lot of movement, I wanted to capture the chaos”—where Mora is contemplative: “I’m a cinema purist.” García López shoots from above; Mora from a more intimate perspective. García López mentions Kusturica and Terrence Malick. Mora references Fellini and Lucrecia Martel. “I think they chose us because we are so different,” says Mora on a video call from her native Medellín, “and because we are a good complement.”

They also reflect the two different histories within the novel. One Hundred Years offers a metaphorical history of civilization in the largest sense, as well as the more specific story of Colombia and the Caribbean. The book never actually mentions dates and it plays with time. This adaptation—conceived by José Rivera, the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Motorcycle Diaries—is linear and closely pegged to what happened in Colombia between 1850 and 1950. García López, perhaps because he is not Colombian, sees the universal message about the failure of societies. Mora highlights the tragedy of Colombia and the country’s inability to find a way to live together after a century of violence. Both directors are quick to point out that their adaptation will be as demanding as the novel. “It is not light entertainment,” says Mora, who compares it to the tone and scope of Killers of the Flower Moon. “It deals with big, strong themes. A complex universe.”

Filming the series, particularly in Colombia, has meant doing justice to a work of art held up as a symbol of patriotic pride. Vásquez, who plays the older José Arcadio Buendía, gets so moved at times that he cries on set. He can’t believe that life has given him the opportunity to play such an emblematic character, even though he spends much of his time tied to a tree.

During production in Colombia, García López says he continually heard: This is so important to us, this story is so Colombian. “I would go, ‘Yes, but once a book sells 50 million copies worldwide, it becomes a global phenomenon. It doesn’t belong to you anymore. It belongs to humanity.’ ”

It is four in the afternoon and the Caribbean sun is easing when I meet Gabriel Eligio Torres García, Gabo’s nephew, in the Parque de Bolívar, one of colonial Cartagena’s main squares. Gabo Gabo, as he is known, gives walking tours of the spots where his uncle used to hang out. He integrates both fictional characters and real places that Gabo mentions in his novels, especially Love in the Time of Cholera, which is mostly set in a city inspired by this walled port.

Gabo Gabo (a nickname given to him by his famous uncle to distinguish him from the other three Gabriels in his family) greets me with typical Caribbean warmth, as if we have known each other all our lives. He points to the park bench where he was sitting and tells me Gabo spent his first night in Cartagena right there. It was 1948. He had dropped out of law school in Bogotá, deciding that he would rebel against his parent’s expectations and dedicate his life to writing. “He didn’t go home to where his parents lived because he knew his mother would be able to figure it out just by looking at him.” He lied and said he would enroll in Cartagena’s law school and convinced a relative to bring him the money he needed for a room. “In the meantime,” Gabo Gabo says, “he would wait and sleep here, until two cops came by, smoked all his cigarettes, and took him to the police precinct.”

Thanks to a recommendation from a friend, Gabo was hired to write editorials at El Universal, my guide tells me as we pass the dilapidated building that used to house the newspaper. At 21, Gabo walked through the arches known as the Clock Tower and realized that Cartagena would become his home in the Caribbean. Gabo Gabo quotes his uncle’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale: “I could not repress the feeling of having been born again.”

In his late 60s, Gabo bought an old yarn factory that faced the sea and hired Rogelio Salmona, Colombia’s premier architect, to build his red-bricked palazzo. It was where he came to “smell the guavas,” the metaphor he used for his yearning for the tropics. Cartagena and its colonial history and architecture—the fortress that kept the pirates at bay—is as storied and beautiful as the Caribbean gets. It was also the place where his parents and most of his siblings had ended up and would religiously gather for New Year’s. Gabo loved walking the streets and getting recognized if he needed a bath of fame, which he sometimes did.

Gabo Gabo sprinkles his stories with indiscreet family details. He tells me that he inherited the role of teller of family lore after his uncle Jaime, Gabo’s brother, succumbed to dementia. “We live with the blessing of our storytelling ability and with the curse of memory loss,” Gabo Gabo says. “My uncle wrote about the plague of forgetfulness in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and here we are 50 years later—a premonition come true.” Gabo Gabo’s own mother Rita’s illness is so advanced that she doesn’t recognize her son.

The sunset hour is approaching as we walk toward Gabo’s house. It is clear from Gabo Gabo’s stories how much Gabo drew his stories and characters from real-life incidents and people. Gabo Gabo’s sister Margot not only ate earth like Rebeca but was as spiteful as Amaranta, both characters in One Hundred Years. The character of Cándida Eréndira, the poor girl who is paraded and prostituted by her grandmother across the desert in the short story that bears her name, is based on a housemaid that serviced all his uncles, including Gabo. I blanch at some of these intimate details. “Did Gabo oppose the telling of such indiscretions?” I ask. According to Gabo Gabo, the great writer’s advice was quite direct: Just make sure you charge money for them.

The family’s skill at storytelling, Gabo Gabo tells me, stemmed from a long-standing tradition during which everybody would sit around and tell and retell the history of their immediate family and its ancestors. “I can identify each one of my aunts and uncles in One Hundred Years of Solitude,” he says. His grandmother was unimpressed by how Gabo, who usually only listened during those storytelling sessions, recycled real-life family tales in his fiction. She always said that she preferred her daughter, Aida Rosa, who was a nun, to her son, who was a Nobel Prize winner.

Gabo Gabo points at a white balconied colonial mansion. That was the inspiration for Fermina Daza’s house in Love in the Time of Cholera, he says. He asks me if I remember how her husband, Dr. Urbino, died. Yes, he fell from a ladder trying to grab a parrot, I say. “That is exactly how Gabo’s grandfather died,” he tells me. “So my uncle took that detail—something that happened when he was eight years old—and, pum, he grabbed it when he needed it.”

After the tour, we stop by to see Jaime Abello, who runs the Gabo Foundation, an organization that García Márquez started in 1995 to promote independent journalism and that has also become an important guardian of Gabo’s legacy. We find Abello sitting at his desk, a portrait of Gabo behind him. He is excited to show us his latest project: a 650-page book written by Juan Valentín Fernández, a Spanish doctor who spent a decade tracing all the medical details and real-life doctors that García Márquez mentioned in his fiction. “Look at how exhaustive Gabo was,” Abello says, showing me the manuscript. “Everything, everything is based in reality.” He turns to Gabo Gabo: “Do you remember the questionnaires?” García Márquez’s closest siblings, friends, and associates would receive pages of questions. Abello got one when Gabo was working on the section in his memoirs about his time in Barranquilla. “He not only wanted to know the name of the brothels, he wanted to know the size of the rooms.”

Abello then grabs another book published by the foundation, titled Gabo, Journalist, a chronology of his life as a reporter and a collection of his quotes about the profession. He opens the book and asks me to read one: “My books are a journalist’s books, even if not many people see them as such. But these books involve a ton of research, checking of data, historical strictness, and dedication to the facts, which in essence makes them fictionalized or fantasized works of reportage. The methods of research and handling of data are those of a journalist.” Abello closes the book with determination: “The real magic is Gabo’s writing.”

The posthumous publication of Gabo’s last novel, combined with the promise of the Netflix series, has sparked Gabomania in Colombia. Everyone who is anyone has written a newspaper column, recorded a podcast, or posted a photograph taken with the great man on social media. The government has organized a Macondo Route, hoping that just as the fans of Game of Thrones visit Croatia to see where the series was filmed, fans of Gabo’s writing will come to Colombia to see the locations from One Hundred Years. In Barranquilla, Gabo readers can now stay in room 204 of a present-day hotel that claims it was the boarding house where he once wrote and borrowed soap.

The Colombian writer Carolina Sanín takes issue with all this off-the-cuff storytelling that takes over her country. She even refuses to call the novelist Gabo. He deserves better than the picturesque approach, she insists. “García Márquez wrote an epic about the birth and rebirth of civilization, written from the other side of the world. He is Latin America’s Homer,” she tells me as we sit in a coffee shop in Bogotá, where she grew up. “He was fully aware of the magnitude of that book. It was an illumination that defined the difference between the Old World and the New World. And why we are different.”

When Until August came out in March, its selling point was that the protagonist was a modern woman who dared to explore her sexuality outside of her marriage. I find it endearing to see García Márquez taking this risk. It speaks of his resilience and discipline that got him to finish his novels: against all odds in his 20s and against all odds in his 80s, with the Damocles sword of dementia dangling over him. But a younger generation of women bristles at the marketing of the novella. “Honestly,” says Nadia Celis, a Colombian-born writer and professor at Bowdoin College who specializes in feminist readings of the Caribbean, “women readers today don’t need someone akin to a grandfather dictating our path to freedom, sexual or otherwise.”

Celis can also be critical of her literary hero. “That I criticize his portrayal of the women does not mean I don’t admire the author or that I dismiss the importance of his work,” she says. In One Hundred Years, Remedios Moscote is nine years old when she is spotted by her Buendía suitor, is married right after her first menstruation, and dies right before giving birth to twins. In Love in the Time of Cholera, Florentino Ariza takes a 12-year-old girl as his lover while he waits for Fermina, the love of his life, to give in to him. When she finally does, he abandons her. América Vicuña, at 14, kills herself. “When I realized that I had read and loved that book as a teenager,” says Celis, “and had not seen the abuse of América Vicuña, I sobbed.”

Later, Celis leaves a message on my phone. “One Hundred Years of Solitude is a warning about our capacity for self-destruction, particularly brought on by men,” she says with professorial confidence. “It is a manual of patriarchy.” García Márquez could see the destruction caused by greed and power. “Sadly, he overlooked the complicity of men when it came to their domination of women.”

Gabo’s and Mercedes’s ashes are interred in the courtyard of the Mercy Convent in Cartagena. A bust of a smiling and mustachioed Gabo watches over it. Their resting place, surrounded by bushes with tiny pink flowers, is tended by a gardener who seems as interested in chatting up visitors as he is in looking after the plants. He heard that Gabo never actually wrote his books. In fact, he tells me with a wink of complicity, they were all written by a peasant who would slip the Nobel laureate the complete pages. All Gabo had to do was take them to a publisher!

A Mexican tourist, holding a copy of one of Gabo’s books, interrupts. He wants a picture in front of the memorial. “I love Gabo,” he offers wholeheartedly.

A security guard joins us. “Some people come and kneel in front of him,” he says.

Yes, but he didn’t write the books, the gardener insists.

The guard points to the second floor of the cloister where he says Mercedes’s ghost appears at noon on her way to microwave her lunch. He also tells of the cloister’s cat that went feral when her ashes arrived. It is a complicated story somehow related to the news that in 1990 Gabo fathered a daughter out of wedlock. I can’t help but wonder at all the things that Gabo left behind, all the stories in the air.

“Who will keep it all?” I wonder aloud.

The guard’s answer could not be simpler, more poetic, or more in keeping with García Márquez’s style:

“The living.”