Walking Mompox’s charming streets is like stepping back in time to a lost and romantic era where little has changed in centuries. It has baroque facades, local legends of supernatural events, and a surreal history involving spectacular wealth and sudden decline. Combined with a steamy climate and remote location, it is easy to see why the town influenced Gabriel García Márquez as he developed his magical realism style of fiction—some of the events that occurred here even made their way into his books.
The Rise and Fall of Mompox
Mompox feels like it comes straight from the pages of a work of magical realism. Its charming streets appear lost in another age, one in which fantastic events could really happen. Just as in a Gabriel García Márquez book, time really does seem to pass differently in Mompox. Its remoteness adds to the sensation, as does its tumultuous history. It wasn’t always a forgotten place, cut off from the world by the vast swamps that surround it. The Magdalena River that flows past its colorful mansions once made it rich and well-connected. Flowing northwards across almost the length of the country, this river was a vital lifeline for Colombia, connecting the interior with the coast. The country’s mountainous geography made overland travel long and arduous while going by boat was quicker. The Magdalena, then, played a vital role in connecting the country to the rest of the world.
Mompox grew rich off the trade that flowed past, and its inhabitants built grand homes and decorated churches to show off their wealth. Thanks to the town’s subsequent isolation and lack of development, these have been perfectly preserved. It wasn’t just the goods passing through that enriched Mompox, however. It contributed to Colombia’s economy through its own artisan jewelry industry. The town’s unique filigree style, developed when smiths from southern Spain settled there, was prized across the Spanish Americas.
Filigree has its origins in the Middle East, and the complex metal threading that defines it is reminiscent of Arabic design. Both the local Indigenous peoples and the Afro-Colombian population had their own long histories of metalworking, and so these elements combined to create a unique hybrid style. Passing shipments of gold and silver being taken back to Spain provided a constant supply of metal to work with. In fact, so much wealth came through the region that one ship sunk off the coast of Cartagena may hold up to $20 billion of precious metals.
Just as García Márquez’s fictional town of Macondo experiences both growth and tragedy in Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), so too did Mompox. In a cruel twist of fate, the river that had brought it success eventually betrayed it and left it stranded in the wilderness. The stretch of the Magdalena that passed it began to silt up and became impossible for larger boats to navigate. Cargo ships were forced to take an alternative route, leaving Mompox isolated and forgotten. Later, the rise of railways and the combustion engine made transporting goods overland easier and destroyed any hope of a revival in fortunes. What had been perhaps the busiest artery of transit in Colombia was transformed into a remote backwater. Mompox had lost its reason for being, and so it became a forgotten jewel, lost among the swamps.
The Life of Gabriel García Márquez
The mountains in the interior that made river travel so important also divided Colombia into cultural regions, very different from each other. The Caribbean coast is particularly distinct from other parts of the country, and it was shaped by its own set of socioeconomic factors. Its traditions draw on those of the local Indigenous and Afro-Colombian population, as well as its sea connections to the wider world. Its music, food, and dialects are unlike those found in Bogotá or Medellín. Gabriel García Márquez was a proud costeño, and despite traveling extensively, it was his home region that inspired him most. He set all of his most well known books in this part of the country.
García Márquez was born in Aracataca but moved several times during his childhood to live in different parts of Colombia’s Caribbean. It was not just the places he saw during his formative years that would influence his writing, but also its people. Foremost among them were his grandparents, who raised him for much of his youth. He cites their love of storytelling as the source of his own desire to write fiction. His grandfather had been a colonel on the liberal side of the civil conflicts against the conservatives. Anyone who has read One Hundred Years of Solitude will recognize him as one of its principal characters—Aureliano Buendía.
After beginning a law degree in the country’s capital, Bogotá, he transferred to a university in Cartagena—back on his beloved Caribbean coast. These were the final days of river travel, so he cruised up and down the Magdalena many times while in Bogotá, making visits to see his family. García Márquez soon decided that it was writing that interested him rather than law, and so he became a journalist. His work took him to Europe and Venezuela before he eventually settled with his family in Mexico. It was here that he found success writing novels.
His books took Latin America by storm before being translated and finding acclaim across the world. He won an array of awards, including the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature. Although authors had experimented with some of its core elements, he is credited with refining the magical realism genre into a distinct style and inspiring other artists to embrace it. Magical realism is marked by its combination of real events with nostalgic and fantasy elements to create rich and dreamlike worlds. In a Gabriel García Márquez novel, magical events are related with the same tone as everyday ones.
Mompox and Its Connection to García Márquez
García Márquez usually created original names for the towns and cities he set his books in or even chose to leave them unnamed. These fictional settings were often fusions of multiple real places in the Caribbean region. While several towns claim to be the places where his novels are set, as with magical realism itself, García Márquez made it hard to separate truth from fantasy. Given its atmospheric beauty and the fact that he had a familial connection to the town, it seems likely that Mompox was one of the places he drew inspiration from.
García Márquez’s wife went to school in Mompox, having been born close by, and it seems likely that they would have visited. His hometown of Aracataca was one of the inspirations for Macondo, the setting for One Hundred Years of Solitude, but it probably wasn’t the only one. Mompox’s population was split between warring liberals and conservatives during the 18th century, for example, just as the novel’s fictional town was. In real life, the town was literally divided by a single street, each faction occupying its own section. Even the cemetery is split into sections—not by religion, but by political affiliation.
Several more of his novels seem to at least partially match the evocative and dreamy feel of Mompox’s streets. Even if García Márquez made it impossible to attribute his novels to one specific place, those making adaptations of his work saw the perfect backdrop in Mompox. In 1981 the film version of Crónica de una muerte anunciada (Chronicle of a Death Foretold) was made there, as were parts of the adaptation of El amor en los tiempos del cólera (Love in the Time of Cholera).
There is one García Márquez book that is unquestionably linked to Mompox. Unlike the fiction for which he is most famous, El general en su laberinto (The General in His Labyrinth) tells the story of Simón Bolívar’s final days. Bolívar too had links to Mompox, and the town was intimately linked to his struggle for independence from Spain. It was the first town in Colombia to declare independence, drawing the liberator there in 1812. He thanked the people during his visit and recruited some of them for his campaign into Venezuela. “If to Caracas I owe my life, then to Mompox I owe my glory,” he later said.
The General in his Labyrinth tells the story of his second stay in Mompox, however. Years later, after decades of war against the Spanish, Bolívar was despondent and in ill health. The territory he had liberated had descended into factionalism and started to splinter into separate countries. Disappointed that his vision for a united South America was failing, Bolívar decided to leave for Europe, but died just as he reached the coast. García Márquez chronicles this journey, including his second visit to Mompox. It was here that he put the most famous quote about the town into the mouth of the liberator. With all the surrealism of one of his works of magical realist fiction, he has Bolívar say that “Mompox does not exist. Sometimes we dream of her, but she does not exist.”
The Town That Feels Like a Dream
It is easy to understand why García Márquez said that about Mompox (albeit through the mouth of Bolívar). It is a place that feels cut off from the rest of the world, where time moves differently, and strange things happen. It is nearly a ghost town during much of the day, as its population has become semi-nocturnal as a method of dealing with the ferocious heat. Life returns in the late evening, when families rock in their wooden chairs in the streets outside of their houses. The squares are full until the early morning, bustling with people of every generation. Grandparents sit on benches talking to their neighbors, adults share meals with their neighbors, and children chase each other on bicycles.
The townspeople tell stories that could be taken from a García Márquez novel. A busy corner is occupied by a foreboding building, avoided by the town’s population. They believe that it is haunted and that anyone who enters will never be able to leave. According to legend, it was built by a man who intended to use it as a brothel and who made a pact with the devil to fund its construction. One of the builders died in mysterious circumstances, as Satan came to claim his due, and his coworkers refused to continue. The owner was as scared as everyone else, and so this shell of a building has always stood empty. Some of the people of Mompox also claim to have been attacked by a supernatural Christian spirit who appears at Easter to punish those who have not done good deeds.
Despite the decline in river travel, life in Mompox still revolves around the waterfront. Some of its grandest buildings lie on the banks of the slowly moving water. Rocking chairs sit in the shade of grand colonnades, from which residents watch wooden canoes drift serenely past. These chairs are a product of another local artisan industry, still made by hand as they would have been centuries ago. Sitting at cafe tables, it is not unusual to be startled by a splash when large reptiles jump into the river from the trees next to you. Smaller lizards defy physics as they run across the surface of the water. Everything about the riverfront looks and feels just like one of Michael Young’s depictions of Macondo.
The old market is one of Mompox’s most beautiful buildings, with one of its main entrances leading directly into the water. This is a legacy of the town’s golden era, when this was how most people entered and exited the town. Today, a new market has been built on the main road, a symbol of how modernity is very slowly arriving. The original building still bustles with life, however. Many of the surrounding villages can still only be reached by boat, so it is here that their residents arrive to buy supplies. Despite these small incursions of modernity, it seems unlikely that Mompox’s surreal charm will fade any time soon.
