Macondo

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Macondo is a fictional town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is the home town of the Buendía family.

Inspired by William Faulkner's fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County, Macondo is often supposed to draw from García Márquez's childhood town, Aracataca, located in a jungle in the north of Colombia, to the southwest of Riohacha. Macondo was the name of a banana plantation near Aracataca, and means "banana" in the Bantu language.

The town first appears in García Márquez's short story Leaf Storm, which describes a Macondo appearing as it does near the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He has since used Macondo as a setting for several other stories.

In June 2006, the people of Aracataca organized a referendum to change the name of the town to Aracataca Macondo. Although the yes vote won, the referendum failed because of lack of voters and Aracataca kept its traditional name.

In the narrative of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the town grows from a tiny settlement with almost no contact with the outside world, to eventually become a large and thriving place, before a banana plantation is set up. The effects of this lead to Macondo's painfully long downfall, followed by a gigantic windstorm that wipes it from the map. As the town grows and falls, different generations of the Buendía family play important roles, contributing to its development.

The fall of Macondo came mostly as a result of a four year rainfall, which destroyed most of the town's supplies and image. During the years following the rainfall, the town begins to empty, as does the Buendía home.