What I Learned Visiting the Set of Netflix’s ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’

The first time I heard the term “production values” was in a film class in college: My brilliant professor was talking about how, whether you liked a film or not, its production value was undeniable. I liked the sound of it, and I liked starting to see films from that point of view. (I’ll sum it up by saying that you can identify production value in a movie or television series’s costumes, scenery, photography, lighting, music—in other words, everything that has nothing to do with the script, the story, or the performances.)

If someone had told me in that college class that a few years later, I would be preparing to travel to Colombia to see where a small-screen adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude was being filmed, I honestly would not have believed it.

Moments before departing for Bogotá, I have no real expectations, focused instead on absorbing as much as I can during a fresh reading of Gabriel García Márquez’s most famous novel. I find myself wondering what insights the brave directors of the series (Alex García López and Laura Mora) will share about their approach, and how the equally bold screenwriters (José Rivera, Natalia Santa, Camila Brugés, María Camila Arias, and Albatrós González) managed to adapt such a complex story, with its intricate timelines and multifaceted characters.

It’s September 2023, a good five years after Netflix first confirmed the project had been greenlit. Why the delay? For starters, there was an extensive research phase—“without rushing, as time wasn’t a critical factor, considering the novel is more than 50 years old,” says Francisco Ramos, Netflix’s vice president of content for Latin America. Ramos is in Ibagué, my first stop, along with García López, at a dinner where they’ll share a preview of what I’ll see tomorrow with other journalists.

The passage of time is a character itself in One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it’s also a key element in the story of how this ambitious adaptation came to fruition. The process of preparing the story, casting the actors, scouting locations, and building the sets was meticulous. “Filming begins as a creative exercise, with us gathered in a room discussing ideas with the screenwriters. However, it eventually becomes a logistical challenge where tasks must be executed with precision, learning primarily from the mistakes made,” the director explains.

García López, an Argentine, brought his experience with complex, large-scale productions like The Witcher and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina to One Hundred Years of Solitude, giving it a global perspective. On the other hand, the specifically Colombian perspective was entrusted to Laura Mora, known for directing projects such as Pablo Escobar: El patrón del mal and The Kings of the World, a film about young people displaced to the countryside as a result of violence in Medellín.

The view from where we’re dining opens up to the well-known mountains of Ibagué, the capital of Tolima. It’s a green, humid place (and it will only grow more humid as we venture deeper into the filming locations). In 1955, García Márquez spent time here during the filming of Edipo Alcalde, for which he wrote the screenplay, seven years before the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Would he have liked to see that the adaptation of a work he considered unadaptable would be filmed here? Neither I nor anyone involved in this project can ever truly know. What I can venture to guess, however, is that he might have appreciated the care and time this production team invested in finding and constructing their perfect Macondo. After all, the Colombian author himself took years to craft this fictional town, which for many was born in One Hundred Years of Solitude but had been whispered into existence through earlier stories.

As a proper name, Macondo first appeared in the 1954 short story “One Day After Saturday” throufh a hotel called “Hotel Macondo.” It debuted as a town in the 1952 story “The Winter,” later republished in Mito magazine in 1955 as “Monologue of Isabel Watching It Rain in Macondo.” Yet it was in Leaf Storm (La hojarasca) that same year that readers were given a more detailed glimpse of this mythical place, with characteristics more closely aligned to the Macondo they would come to know in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Before heading to the next stop in the municipality of Alvarado, about half an hour from Ibagué, I take a moment to trace the origins of Macondo. There’s an almost poetic parallel between how the creators of the adaptation and García Márquez discovered this nonexistent town—the former through journeys across Colombia, the latter through a collection of stories, tales, and notes.

“García Márquez often asserted that to write each book, one first had to learn how to write it, and only then confront the typewriter. It took him nearly 20 years of ‘living’ in Macondo to learn how to write his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Conrado Zuluaga, Colombian author and editor, wrote in the introduction to the anthology Camino a Macondo.

For the Netflix production, it was not 20 years but several trips to find this place, surrounded by mountains, where part of the town of Macondo and the Buendía house are located. (The rest of the locations are spread across the Colombian departments of La Guajira, Magdalena, Cesar, and Cundinamarca.) On the day of my visit, the fragment of the story set in 1855, the time of full prosperity for Macondo and the Buendía family, is being filmed.

The first thing to understand in order to grasp the complexity of this production is that four different versions of Macondo were created from scratch to maintain authenticity over the course of time. “In this production, the greatest challenge has been the passage of time, as the story spans one hundred years, affecting the sets, costumes, cast, and every aspect. Everything had to be adapted to the different eras of the narrative,” explains Diego Ramírez Schrempp, the series’s executive producer.

Just as there is a parallel between the production’s work and the creation of Macondo in García Márquez’s imagination, there is also one with how José Arcadio Buendía builds the town in the book.

“José Arcadio Buendía, who was the most enterprising man ever to be seen in the village, had set up the placement of the houses in such a way that from all of them one could reach the river and draw water with the same effort, and he had lined up the streets with such good sense that no house got more sun than another during the hot time of day. Within a few years Macondo was a village that was more orderly and hard working than any known until then by its three hundred inhabitants. It was a truly happy village where no one was over thirty years of age and where no one had died,” García Márquez wrote in a passage of the novel that introduces Macondo’s golden era.

On the set of the Netflix series, there are men and women whose energy rivals that of the town’s patriarch. Bárbara Enríquez, the production designer, and Carolina Caicedo, the producer, are prime examples; both speak passionately about the exhaustive work done so far.

“The main construction [of Macondo and the Buendía house] is located on a site called Finca Arizona. We built several additional structures that reflect the evolution and development of the town. We constructed a ranchería in La Guajira, and to show the passage of time within Macondo, we built three separate towns, each representing different stages of its growth,” explains Caicedo.

The town’s streets lie on a 520,000-square-meter plain (roughly 130 acres), along with a tent of approximately 800 square meters (more than 8,600 square feet) that houses the Buendía family’s home, where they live, suffer, cry, and laugh. It’s an operation involving 1,100 people at its peak.

Inside the Buendía houseCarefully, we follow Bárbara Enríquez, who knows every path like the back of her hand. The Buendía house hides like a magic trick in a gray tent that began being built in April 2023.

“Everything you see in the gardens is alive,” she says as she guides the tour. The house is at its greenest, with the plants in the front and back gardens—corn, coffee, bananas, begonias—all taken from the novel. To guarantee its authenticity, the landscaping was overseen by a Colombian, Marta Duque, who, in turn, relied on the book Flora de Macondo by Santiago Madriñan. This 2014 publication meticulously analyzes the species in García Márque’s story.

The chestnut tree where José Arcadio Buendía will lose his mind.

Photo: Mauro Gonzalez / Netflix

Though the tent may appear sealed, natural light filters in, to captivating effect: in the center of the house, a chestnut tree is illuminated—the very tree to which José Arcadio Buendía will eventually be bound. But this tree isn’t real; it’s an architectural and sculptural creation, made of cement and reinforced with wire mesh.

After the tent, the house was completed in three months, with an additional floor added in 19 days—“a significant engineering feat,” per Bárbara Enríquez. The hallways reveal the characters’ rooms, the dining area, living rooms, and, of course, that alchemy lab that caused so much trouble for Úrsula Iguarán. “The decoration of the house is inspired by direct quotes from the book, like the 12-person dining table and the artwork featuring maidens and flowers. While we followed many literal references for the decor and spaces, we also made adaptations to include all the rooms mentioned in the story,” says the designer. Additionally, “every yellow flower we see is because he said these were good luck. The book is full of things that have to do with his biography, memories and his childhood, everything is tucked in here.”

Art directors Óscar Tello and Catalina Ángulo expended an extraordinary amount of effort to make the set look like a livable home: the furniture was collected from Colombian antique dealers and museums, and José Arcadio’s laboratory and Aureliano’s silver workshop were scattered with instruments that existed at the time.

The rooms of the Buendía house.

Photo: Mauro Gonzalez / Netflix

It was an explicit wish of the García Márquez family that the series be filmed in Colombia; but more than that, for Rodrigo García Barcha, his son, it was important that the production give back to the local community. “Rodrigo was keen that the series not only be Colombian but also contribute to the development of the country’s cultural industry, leaving a significant industrial and professional legacy. We believe cultural industries are crucial, as they not only create jobs but also promote greater sophistication in how we communicate as human beings,” Francisco Ramos explained to me the day before. This is evident in the house and, later, in the greater town of Macondo. Materials like tiles and palm thatch were sourced from local suppliers, while other elements such as bed linens and ceramics were crafted by local artisans. In total, over 150 artisans from various communities contributed to the production.

In the streets of MacondoPapalelo Street. “Papalelo” was the name Gabriel García Márquez used to refer to his grandfather when he was a child.

Photo: Mauro Gonzalez / Netflix

Gabriel Eligio Torres García, one of García Márquez’s nephews, wrote in his book La casa de los García Márquez that Margarita, García Márquez’s sister, whom her loved ones affectionately called “Margot,” was a child who ate dirt and “savored it like a dish fit for the gods”—much like Rebeca, the mysterious girl who arrives at the Buendía house carrying a sack of bones. Today, her name adorns one of the streets in the town built for the Netflix adaptation. It is one of many tributes to the writer’s family. (It’s worth noting that not only were the street signs hand-painted by artisans, but some of the images alongside the titles were directly sourced from the family’s photographic archive.) This is the Macondo of the golden days, with a cigar store, a grocery store, a cabinet shop, the Hotel Jacob, and Pietro Crespi’s shop—crammed with toys and figures sourced from antique dealers, restored by Colombian artists, or made in wood by artisans.

The streets of Macondo.

Photo: Juan Cristobal Cobo / Netflix

Construction on the town began in November 2022, covering about 10 acres. Nothing I see was here before the project started; 16,000 native Caribbean plants were transplanted to give the houses’ gardens a coastal feel, channels had to be created to prevent flooding (since this is a geographically rainy area), and an electrical system was installed beneath the construction

Apolinar Moscote’s offices are a good indicator of the novel’s political backdrop: as conservatives began to gain power, they painted their houses blue. Then there’s the pharmacy, where once again, the effort to replicate every detail with historical accuracy is evident. On the facade is a sign that reads “Doctor Septimus”; this was the pseudonym García Márquez used during his time as a columnist for the paper El Heraldo.

The toys in Pietro Crespi’s store.

Photo: Mauro Gonzalez / Netflix

The almond trees in the village.

Photo: Mauro Gonzalez / Netflix

The tour ends at the school, with long desks arranged according to the Lancastrian educational model of the 19th century. Of course, the sets were made to be disassembled and modified as time goes by; Macondo and the Buendía house I saw today will inevitably be razed. But at a special meal prepared for our group, each of us is gifted a little golden fish with a turquoise eye—a memento that will end up in my jewelry box.

Photo: Mauro Gonzalez / Netflix

Several months after my visit to Colombia, I have the opportunity to see the first episodes of the series, shortly before its official premiere. I quickly understand what Netflix’s Francisco Ramos meant when he talked about wanting to maintain the integrity of the story. “We have been very meticulous and detailed in the deconstruction of the text,” he said at that dinner in front of the mountains of Ibagué. Alex García López explained that the scriptwriters had to “balance the editing and give more emphasis to the chronology to make it easier to understand,” wwhile preserving the essence of the story and its characters.

The show’s creators are aware that they cannot please everyone. But production value? That, Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude—one of the most ambitious and grandest works ever produced in Latin America—has in spades.

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