‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’: How Netflix brought the imaginary town of Macondo to life

In the long-awaited Netflix adaptation of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (“Cien Años de Soledad”), the literary masterpiece of Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, one of the most beloved Latin American towns to never exist is brought to the screen.

How do you bring to life one of the most beloved Latin American towns — one that has a century of history, but never existed at all? That was the task facing the production team of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (or “Cien Años de Soledad”), the long-awaited Netflix adaptation of a novel widely lauded as being among the 20th century’s greatest literary works. Written in 1967 by the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, the book follows seven generations of the Buendía family, who follow cyclical paths of obsession, yearning, idealism and detachment, and are tied inextricably to the fate of their home, Macondo. From one of the first scenes, as Colonel Aureliano Buendía faces down a firing squad against a bloodied, white stucco wall on a clear day, viewers are transported into Macondo, an isolated riverside settlement that flourishes into a prosperous town before confronting war and colonialist exploitation. As one of the most famous works in the magical realism genre, the book’s setting teems with the supernatural and the dreamlike, though they are treated as everyday occurrences. Early on, an insomnia plague sinks residents into a haze of short-term memory loss; later, a single trickle of blood turns corners, crosses streets and climbs curbs to alert the family matriarch, Úrsula, of a shocking death. Before his death in 2014, García Márquez credited his storytelling style to that of his grandmother, who talked of fantastic things “with complete naturalness.” “What was most important was the expression she had on her face,” he told The Paris Review in 1981. “In previous attempts to write ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ I tried to tell the story without believing in it. I discovered that what I had to do was believe in them myself and write them with the same expression with which my grandmother told them: with a brick face.”