A mythical, historic Macondo: ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ becomes a Netflix series

One Hundred Years of Solitude is the epitome of magical realism. It’s a plague of insomnia that leaves residents of an entire town sleepless, to the point of forgetting who they are. It is Mauricio Babilonia beset by yellow butterflies. It is a bag of bones that moves without explanation. It is Remedios la Bella rising to the sky. It is the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar following José Arcadio Buendía everywhere he goes. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a tale of omens, superstitions and magic. But it is also the Thousand Days’ War, the most lethal civil war in Colombian history, which took place between 1899 and 1902. It is the Banana Massacre, when the military shut down a United Fruit Company workers’ strike with a bloodbath.

In this dichotomy between a mythical Macondo, “the land that no one had promised them,” and the history of a nation marked by violence, stands the first audiovisual adaptation of one of the greatest Spanish-language novels of all time. It’s been nearly six years since Netflix announced in early 2019 that it had purchased the rights to Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece. In the words of Rodrigo García, the son of the Nobel laureate, the writer left just three guidelines for audiovisual interpretation of the work: that such a production be told, “in many hours, in Spanish and in Colombia.” On December 11, Netflix will release the first season of one of the most ambitious audiovisual projects in the history of Latin America.

The series will tell the tale of seven generations of Buendías over the course of 16 episodes, divided evenly between two seasons. The project implied a serious challenge to all involved, amplified by the sky-high expectations generated by the adaptation of a novel that has sold over 50 million copies around the world — not to mention those of its home country, where the story is seen as a reflection of society itself. This, according to its screenwriter Natalia Santa, in an interview that took place by video call in mid-October. “For us, it was very important to understand the novel first as a great document of Colombian history and as a portrait of our society, how we are as a nation, a nation that has suffered from centuries of violence. One Hundred Years of Solitude offers a stark portrait of violence in Colombia, what it has meant on a political level, but also its impact on everyday life, on families.”

The adaptation first began to take shape in the hands of screenwriter and playwright José Rivera, after which it was sent to three Colombian writers: Camila Brugés, Albatros González and Santa. The three of them worked on the script for two and a half years and continued to develop it in parallel once production began. They faced serious hurdles in transitioning a novel so full of characters and events, and were forced to make painful decisions about what to include, what to leave out, and how. Although the novel’s plot jumps between time periods, one of Netflix’s conditions was that the adaptation should be told in chronological order. The streaming platform also requested a narrator, to lend a certain unity to a work that can often move rapidly, with characters that had to be played by three or four different actors in order to portray them at different points in their lives, as in the cases of José Arcadio Jr. and Aureliano. There was also the matter of making sure the novel’s most key moments were represented on screen. “There are precious images that stay with readers and surely as viewers, they will be expecting them to be in the series,” says Brugés.

The real deal

“The Macondo in the series is a historically correct Macondo. It may not be the Macondo that everyone has in their head, because that depends on each person’s imagination, but it is a Macondo located within actual history, that makes political, architectural sense. That seemed like the most reliable way to us to approach this legendary town, as the historic Macondo,” says Bárbara Enríquez, the series’ production designer. The plot’s century doesn’t just dwell on specific people and events, it also shows how the utopic town grows after being founded by cousins José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán with their family members and friends after leaving their ranches.

“Macondo is a combination of scenery and a lot of civil engineering,” Enríquez says, also by video call. The town, which had to grow as filming of its story progressed, was built in Alvarado, near the city of Ibagué, a setting that was both reminiscent of the Colombian Caribbean, where the novel is set, and met logistical requirements for hosting a film shoot of this magnitude. More than 200 workers labored for nearly a year on the construction of the village, from its sewage and electrical systems to sidewalks, in four phases that culminated with its most complete version. “The idea was to pass through Colombia’s architectural history. In Macondo, we have Vernacular architecture made from mud and cañabrava, then Colonial architecture, then Republican architecture from the mid-19th to the beginning of the 20th century. It is a tribute to the country’s great buildings, heavily based on the Colombian Caribbean,” says Enríquez.

Casa Buendía, the home of the protagonist family, also grows and evolves. “If Macondo is the primary being in One Hundred Years of Solitude, the house is the most important one, a character unto itself, the uterus in which all of this crazy family’s conflicts take place. It’s a house that is happy, gets depressed, enters into war, is reborn,” says the production designer. The first version of the building, which is represented by a façade in the setting, but whose interior is located elsewhere, took 25 weeks to build. From there, as the story dictates, rooms were added, a second story built. This evolution made it necessary to organize the filming in such a way that, after shooting the house in one of its phases, the team would take advantage of shooting in other locations in order to work on the building’s evolution. “The house is a Buendía itself,” says Enríquez.

More than 34,000 wardrobe pieces

Studying the fashion of the time was no easy task for the team led by costume designer Catherine Rodríguez. The 34,000 pieces of clothing and footwear worn in the series were all made from scratch by a 100% Colombian crew. “The wardrobe is like a living animal,” says Rodríguez — but a poorly documented animal, given that it was complicated to find records of what anyone but the upper classes wore during the periods documented in the novel. The team largely relied on illustrations by the Comisión Corográfica, a scientific project funded by the Colombian government in the mid-19th century, and books by travelers like the Spanish José María Gutiérrez de Alba. “We did large amounts of research that later translated into drawings, and then into textile research,” says Rodríguez.

One of the wardrobe team’s goals was that the artisans who made the pieces be the ones to select the materials from which they were constructed, “that they be handcrafted pieces that passed from their hands to ours,” she says. Members of the Wayúu, Colombia’s most populous Indigenous community, also participated by making traditional costumes for the two Wayúu characters in the story, Visitación and Cataure.

Cicadas and Colombian bagpipes

Macondo sounds like Colombian bagpipes and string orchestras, wind and cicadas, military drums. “Macondo is very rich sonorously; this country is very rich in sounds. Mixing all of its worlds was the most complicated thing,” says composer Camilo Sanabria, who led the series’ soundtrack in collaboration with Juancho Valencia, who oversaw its live music. Creating the right auditory atmosphere was key to the One Hundred Years of Solitude universe. “I was experimenting with very basic sounds in the beginning, very primary elements like drums, the wind. Little by little, the sound becomes more sophisticated,” says Sanabria, pointing as example to the moment when Pietro Crespi’s pianola arrives in Macondo, which signals the addition of European notes to its soundscape.

“There was very rigorous research, but we also gave ourselves the license to deconstruct folk music, to mold it. It had to be very flexible, because we were telling the creation story of a new world,” says Sanabria. Instruments like bottles and marimbas helped to mark the passage of time and tap into the absurdist humor so present in the novel. The sound of war in Macondo is a solemn sound characterized by string and percussion instruments. “This is a Macondo full of very rare and special sounds, of very different layers,” Sanabria continues. The composer invokes the simile of alchemy that the character of Melquíades brings to the original tale. “Through alchemy, he wants to create gold from other materials. Music is like that, from one material I create another, an atmosphere. It is the search for identity.”

And so, with intricate layers of textures, sounds, images, words and even 16,000 native Caribbean plants brought to the set to approximate the look and smell of the Macondo that Gabo described, literary magical realism comes to life on screen. “This is an era of technological, image-based and audiovisual advances, and you can actually replicate the things García Márquez wrote about happening in Macondo,” says Santa. “They are extraordinary events, but he talks about them in an ordinary way. No one is surprised when Remedios la Bella ascends — she simply ascends. Melquíades does not age. Mauricio Babilonia is chased by yellow butterflies. These are things that happen and are accepted as natural,” she says.

In 16 episodes of the series, there will be many things that are different from the novel, and others that stay the same. Everyone involved in its production expects that there will be a varied reaction from readers and viewers. But one thing that hasn’t changed, what couldn’t change, is how the tale begins: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

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