Gabriel García Márquez literary route through Barranquilla

If you've ever lost yourself in the pages of One Hundred Years of Solitude, you'll surely want to know that Barranquilla gave Gabriel García Márquez the inspiration for many of his characters. In this city on Colombia's Caribbean coast, which took him in as a child and which he frequented in the 1950s, he became a journalist, found his circle of friends and married the love of his life. This Gabriel García Márquez literary tour of Barranquilla covers those places in four hours.

After picking you up from your hotel, the first stop is the former El Heraldo building, the newspaper where he started writing as a columnist and reporter. Along Paseo Bolívar you reach the Rascacielos Nueva York. What does this building have to do with the Nobel laureate? It's one of the surprises of the tour.

The most personal part comes at the Iglesia del Perpetuo Socorro, where in 1958 he married Mercedes, his childhood sweetheart. Their story stays with you all the way to the Mariposas Amarillas (Yellow Butterflies) monument, next to the Intendencia Fluvial, and to the statue of Gabo in the Parque Cultural del Caribe. In the El Prado neighbourhood you'll pass the hotel where the couple had their first date and the former Bellas Artes building, where he met the Italian Pedro Biava, who may have inspired Pietro Crespi in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The tour ends at La Cueva, the bar where Gabo used to meet his intellectual friends to talk about everything, with a drink included before heading back to your hotel.

And if you want to keep following his trail through Colombia, there's the Macondo literary route through Aracataca and the Gabo literary free tour of Cartagena de Indias.