Gabriel García Márquez

📍Casa Museo Gabriel García Márquez, Aracataca, Magdalena, Colombia

“My parents left me as a baby with my mother's parents in their big rambling house in Aracataca, a banana town baking in the Caribbean heat, and I lived there until I was eight. My grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, a veteran of the Thousand Days' War, was my best friend; he told me true stories about the town and the massacre of the banana workers, and when I was five he took me to the United Fruit Company's store to touch ice for the first time. My grandmother, Tranquilina, told stories of ghosts, omens and the dead in the same calm voice she used for the weather, and the house was full of aunts and cousins and rooms where no one was allowed after dark. I felt the real and the fantastic lived in different rooms of that house. Years later, writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, I found I could finally tell those stories with my grandmother's straight face — and Aracataca became Macondo. The house has been rebuilt as the Casa Museo Gabriel García Márquez.”

Sources: nybooks.com hrc.utexas.edu colombiaone.com