García Márquez heads home

García Márquez fans hold up placards and paintings to celebrate the return of Aracataca's most famous son who was born here 79 years ago. The author spent the first eight years of his life in the village and his former home is now a museum. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

García Márquez and his wife Mercedes Barcha look out of the window as they pull into Aracataca. The village was fictionalised in the author's 1967 novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, which chronicles the struggles of one family and the events in their village over a century. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

García Márquez, who won the Nobel prize for literature for his oeuvre in 1982, wrote in his autobiography that many of his novels are based on the towns where he spent his childhood. However although the village of Macondo is fictional, many of the events in One Hundred Years of Solitude relate to real historical happenings. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

García Márquez has spent most of his life living in Mexico and Europe. He last returned to the village in 1983, a year after winning the Nobel, and credits a visit to his home town in the 50s as the inspiration for becoming a novelist. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

Last June in a quirk of fate that wouldn't be out of place in one of García Márquez's novels, residents failed to pass a referendum to change the name of the author's home town to Aracataca-Macondo because high absenteeism invalidated the results. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

One Hundred Years of Solitude which spans seven generations of the Buendía family and includes plagues, massacres, wars and regular supernatural happenings also reflects the cyclical history of Colombia and Latin America. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

The story begins with Colonel Aureliano Buendía recalling the strong-willed patriarch of the Buendía family, José Arcadio Buendía. It is Aureliano and his brother Arcadio who dominate the story, but less and less detail is devoted to each generation of descendants as the town swarms and then palpably decays. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

Only one character, Úrsula, in García Márquez's epic tale survives through the entire length of the complex story, which is further complicated by the Buendías' family trait of naming their children after relatives. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

In the tropical hamlet of Macondo many unexplained events occur such as a plague of insomnia and the unexpected ascenscion into the sky of Remedios the Beauty. Another character, Mauricio Babilonia, is permanently followed by a swarm of butterflies. Aracataca has now adopted the symbol of the butterfly and residents painted them on the walls of the train station in time for García Márquez's visit. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

A man holds a banner that reads "Thank you for returning to Aracataca", written in Spanish, at the town's train station. García Márquez made the trip to his home town on the inaugural journey of the "Macondo Express" which will run on a new tourist route dedicated to the author. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP

An acrobat performs to celebrate García Márquez's arrival. The town is hoping that the new train route will bring much-needed tourist dollars to the region. Although the author divides his time between Los Angeles and Mexico City, he also has a home in nearby Cartagena. Photograph: William Fernando Martinez/AP