One Hundred Years of Solitude: Is the Netflix Series Inspired by a True Story?

It’s one of Netflix’s most ambitious series yet, and it just arrived on the platform. The first part of this American-Colombian fiction in 16 episodes has already entered the top 10 of the most watched series of that moment.

And for good reason, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a large-scale work that chronicles the Buendía family over seven generations in the village of Macondo, which he founded and which he flourished for decades.

Is the TV series “One Hundred Years of Solitude” inspired by a real story?

One Hundred Years of Solitude is a quasi-historical fresco depicting a century of the Buendía family’s life, from the exile of its patriarch José Arcadio Buendía, who founded the city where its members were born, to its last successor.

Cursed to live a hundred years of solitude, the Buendía family will go through wars, conflicts, massacres, and many of the tragedies of Colombian history, while experiencing greatness and decadence.

From the founding of the village, to its socio-political and economic development, to its fall, the Buendia family will always evolve with the world without being a complete part of it.

If the series is close to certain historical facts, it still remains a fiction that belongs to the genre of magical realism. Because One Hundred Years of Solitude It is an adaptation of a masterpiece of Spanish literature, which was ranked among the 100 best books of all time.

An adaptation of a literary masterpiece imbued with a certain realism

Published in 1967, this novel has sold more than 50 million copies and has been translated into over forty languages, written by Colombian novelist, short story writer, journalist, and Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel García Márquez.

Not known to be adapted One Hundred Years of Solitude is the work of its author’s life, which tells the story of the mythical (but imaginary) city of Macondo, the Buendy family, curses, dreams, madness and impossible love.

Although a fictional invention, One Hundred Years of Solitude is imbued with a certain realism, as Gabriel García Márquez came up with the idea for the novel during a trip to Aracataca, his native Colombia.

Before writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, the author had already distilled some elements of his work into other tales, e.g. One day from Saturdaywhere Macondo was mentioned and other novels where certain characters had already appeared.

If this idea had been brewing in his head for a long time, it was thanks to a trip to Acapulco in Mexico that the half-realistic, half-fantasy tone came. After many obstacles and a painful and dangerous writing process, One Hundred Years of Solitude was published and became a huge success even after his death in 2014.

The Netflix series bringing this monumental work back to the fore was filmed in Colombia with the support of the author’s family and co-directed by Alex García López (Misfits, Marvel’s Luke Cage, The Witcher, Star Wars: The Acolyte) and Laura Mora (Frontera Verde, Los reyes del mundo) ).

The first part of the series “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is available on Netflix.