Colombia’s epic story comes to the screen through the vision of production designer Bárbara Enríquez.
Macondo has never been easy to find. One must search for it exhaustively, only to encounter it where you least expect it. The mythical town imagined by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez in his book One Hundred Years of Solitude tends to materialize only when desperation forces travelers to surrender and allow destiny to be their guide. This is what happens to the Buendías, the family at the center of the novel. It’s only after they have given up on their desire to reach the sea, after two harrowing years of travel, that an epiphany reveals to them the exact location where this magical place must be built.
Something similar happened to the production design and locations teams behind One Hundred Years of Solitude’s ambitious series adaptation. For a long time, designers, decorators, and location experts explored various regions of Colombia in search of the ideal setting to re-create Macondo.
“We found incredible locations, but it was raining all the time,” says production designer Bárbara Enríquez, whose work on Roma earned her an Oscar nomination. Finally, the crew found what they were looking for in Tolima, a municipality only five hours from the Colombian capital of Bogotá. Immersed in a mountain range, the locale also provided the vistas required to complete the imagery of the village.
The first version of Macondo was erected close to a river, just like in the book. It depicts the village in its nascent stage, when the Buendías and the other families they travel with establish a community built on solidarity, its little white houses hidden in the jungle foliage. There is no religion, no government, and no inequality: The first settlers live in a tiny, isolated utopia.
But the town is not a static entity. One Hundred Years of Solitude tells the story of a Colombian family throughout several generations — and as the decades pile on, Macondo never ceases to transform. The powers of civilization are eventually installed, and the village abandons its state of grace. This metamorphosis made it necessary for the production team to build three different versions of the place.
“The novel is a sort of genesis of humankind,” Enríquez explains. “At first, they lived in this perfect world. This means everything is very natural, surrounded by nature, and as civilization arrives, that begins to change. For better and for worse. Our challenge was to show this symbolic evolution of humankind itself and insert it within the history of Colombia.”
At all times, the production designer refuses to speak in the singular. She emphasizes that it was thanks to the collective effort of some five hundred people — from decorators to scenic painters, artisans, metalworkers, construction workers, and other specialists — that they were able to build two whole towns: the primitive Macondo, next to the Magdalena River, and a more mature version in Alvarado — a township also in Tolima — that would grow and be modified as time went on within the series.
The enterprise was, in Enríquez’s own words, “a gigantic monster.” In Alvarado, which was cow pasture before becoming the film’s main set, the team built 130 independent structures (facades and interiors) over a forty-thousand-square-meter piece of land, beginning in January 2023. By midyear it was already possible to wander through one of the most iconic places in Western literature. One could walk past its school, stores, houses, central square, and streets (named after some of the most important women in the Colombian author’s life). The production also planted close to sixteen thousand native Colombian Caribbean plants, to match the novel’s atmosphere and smells.
It is my job to build it and then destroy it, with all the pain in my heart.
Bárbara Enríquez
It was on this set that Macondo bore the many necessary changes that are required by the passage of time. As the years went by in the story, the art department laid out new streets, erected new buildings, and constructed second stories to make the evolution of the town a reality. The Buendías’ home set the pace: Its facade is part of the exterior architecture, but the interiors were re-created inside a big tarp to protect the furniture and to allow for the control of temperature and light. Its construction, a feat of set design and civil engineering, lasted 25 weeks, although, like everything in Macondo, it is also a living thing in constant transformation.
“The Buendía home is probably the most important set because, in terms of narrative, it’s like the uterus, where all these changes occur, where the characters are born, raised, mature, and decompose,” explains Enríquez. “It’s what marks the passage of time and Macondo follows. Both worlds are growing in tandem.”
To visualize the universe of One Hundred Years of Solitude, it was essential that every element and building was firmly set within the history of Colombia. The challenge was first to piece together the temporal puzzle of the book, which jumps between past, present, and future and doesn’t always offer detailed descriptions of the eras it goes through. This is not a historical novel, but it is set between early-nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth-century Colombia, so the art department turned to colonial and republican architecture as a reference and adhered to the evolution of building materials through these historical periods.
Set decorators also visited antique shops in Colombia in search of the right furniture, toys, utensils, and ornaments. According to Enríquez, close to 85 percent of the furniture and objects are completely original, and the production team also took care to collaborate with Indigenous communities for the creation of textiles, basketry, clay pots, jewelry, and other props. For the production designer, this decision was a matter of responsibility.
“Making these trips and having this close relationship with Native communities doesn’t make the job easier, but it does make it more valuable,” she explains. “The purpose is not only that it looks good onscreen, but for this project to reach Colombia before it even releases there. That it gets done with the labor, effort, and talent of the Colombian people. We’re dealing with an adaptation of their greatest literary work.”
One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel, is also the story of an improbable place. There, trapped between the whims of the mountains and the marsh, its founders take root, organize themselves, and raise houses above the swampy ground. They fall in love, have children, wage war, betray each other, dream, and get sick from both insomnia and imagination. Macondo is also a metaphor for the obstinate foolishness of human existence, which manages to exist despite everything.
The fully realized town that Enríquez’s team built for the film also shares a little of this improbability: Its ephemeral nature as a location shouldn’t allow the set to stand firm for very long in the open air. But, against all odds, it has. “We knew that Macondo had to stand for years because that’s how long the shoot would be and it would have to survive in the open air of Colombia, the country with the most amount of rain in the world,” she explains. “So, let’s just say we invented a new way of building.”
And yet, this town has always been destined to disappear. Enríquez knows it, and though she’s not a stranger to the art of building worlds and then watching them crumble, she talks of the imminent demolition of Macondo (logistical, but also narrative) with a certain hint of anticipated nostalgia. It’s very likely that this legendary place, made palpable for the first time, will be reduced once more to the dust-filled home of a solitary cow. Or, at the very least, the set as they’ve built it won’t be the same as it was in all its glory.
“Even though it’s a wonderful place and the set could become a spot to visit, the decline is coming [in the next episodes of the series],” says Enríquez. “It is my job to build it and then destroy it, with all the pain in my heart.”
Only the images will remain as evidence that it ever existed. Because, as Gabriel García Márquez said, places like Macondo don’t usually get second chances on this earth.
