"Barcelona in 6 reflections by Gabriel García Márquez"

The Columbian author on the capital of Catalonia, his home from 1967-75 (and mine for the last 18 years)

Jan 17, 2025

“Gabriel García Márquez and his family first arrived in Barcelona in November 1967. It was not a tourist visit. The Colombian writer traveled to the Catalan city with the determination to live there and write The Autumn of the Patriarch , the fifth novel in his entire work and the first after the overwhelming success of One Hundred Years of Solitude .

This period in Barcelona was one of the most fruitful in his career as a writer and coincided with the rise and fall of the so-called Latin American boom. Although he lived in various buildings in the city (an aparthotel on Calle Lucano, in the Putxet neighbourhood, and an apartment at number 168 on Avenida República de Argentina), it was on the ground floor of number 6 on Calle Caponata, in Sarriá, where he lived most of the time before leaving for Mexico in 1975.

Carmen Balcells, his literary agent, lived in Barcelona and several publishing projects were carried out, including Relato de un náufrago (1970), La incondicional y extraño historia de la gullible Eréndira y de su abuela (1972), Cuando era feliz y undocumentado (1973) and Ojos de perro azul (1974).

Although his famous novel about the Latin American dictator, El otoño del patriarca , was published shortly after Gabo and Mercedes left Spain, the entire creative process corresponds to this period in which even the Franco dictatorship served as inspiration for setting part of the story. Similarly, some of the stories that make up the Twelve Pilgrim Tales are set in Barcelona and in various provinces of Catalonia that the author visited during these years. Examples of this are “Tramontana”, “María dos Prazeres” and “Sólo vin a hablar por telefónica”.

At the Gabo Centre we have compiled six reflections by Gabriel García Márquez on Barcelona. We share them with you:

1. Barcelona, a city impossible to leave

I arrived in Barcelona in the autumn of 1967, with my whole family and with the intention of staying for eight months that I had left over from a novel, and I stayed for seven years. What's more, in some way that's difficult to explain, I still haven't left completely, and I don't think I ever will.

“Spain: the nostalgia of nostalgia.”

Column by Gabriel García Márquez published in El Espectador and El País , January 12, 1982.

2. The city of the Catalan Wise Man

In the years I lived in Barcelona, I went from not having enough to eat to being able to buy houses. I have the impression that the city did not surprise me much. It was as if I had already seen it before. The reason I did not go anywhere else is Ramón Vinyes, the “Catalan sage” who I made appear as a character in One Hundred Years of Solitude . In the Barranquilla of my youth, he had “sold” me the idealized Barcelona of his memories of exile to such an extent that I did not doubt for a moment.

“Stopping writing hasn’t changed my life.”

The Vanguard , February 2006.

3. The Latin Americans of Las Ramblas

I felt a great nostalgia for those beautiful nostalgias that night last week when I left the theater with my friends from Barcelona. The Ramblas were more crowded and delirious than ever, still with the enormous colored Christmas lights. In the middle of the bustling crowd, the clueless gringos and the succulent, almost naked Swedish women in January, were the exiles from Latin America with their public stalls selling trinkets, with their children wrapped in rags, surviving as best they can while the ship of return arrives for them as well. There are perhaps 250,000 of them in all of Spain, and there are not many who are lucky enough to be loved in Spain as much as we loved the wandering Republicans who taught us to live the nostalgia of nostalgia.

“Spain: the nostalgia of nostalgia.”

Column by Gabriel García Márquez published in El Espectador and El País , January 1982.

4. The novel that was written in Barcelona

The novel The Autumn of the Patriarch was written in Barcelona because I needed to experience the atmosphere of an old dictatorship. Spanish daily life and its history are in the book. I can even say that one of the problems that arose in the creation of the work was that Spanish daily reality interfered a lot with the book. For example: the general's wife, Leticia Nazareno, should have died when a huge charge of dynamite exploded in the trunk of her car. This episode was written two years before the death of Carrero Blanco, but after that I had to find another way for her to die because the journalistic version of the attack was surprisingly similar to what I had written, and that is how the dogs came out. You know that the book has had a new impetus in Spain after Franco's death because the Spanish have suddenly found that reality was giving them references that they had already seen in the book and that, possibly, are coincidental, I don't know; It was also that I lived in Spain for six or seven years while I wrote the book and, perhaps unconsciously, I observed the reality that surrounded me. The impression I have is that the Spanish were unable to identify either the context or the characters until the moment when Franco began his agony, because of the circumstances of this, the atmosphere that was created around his death and probably because of the reaction that the reader himself experienced when Franco's death was imminent. Nevertheless, it is likely that the character to whom the patriarch least resembles is Franco. Franco was a very strange character, he was an ascetic, a man who lacked any ambition, except for power, he had no other, it was the ambition of power pure and simple. He seemed a man without passions, extremely cold. I know him very poorly, I did not do any research on his figure. Anyway, the funny thing is that I have news of friends who have returned to the book with a different perspective after that month of agony in which no one knew if he was alive, if he was not alive, if he was already embalmed or not, etc.

“Garcia Marquez in Mexico”.

Journal of the University of Mexico , February 1976.

5. A place where it is possible to write

The people of Barcelona are great. The Spanish are great. I'm going to stay here because it's less expensive than Paris and they let you work more than in Madrid, where there's a tavern at every turn and friends, and they're so nice, and everything is so full of temptations. Besides, I like Barcelona very much, even though I don't feel the same way I did in my country.

“GGM’s good hour”.

Hispanic American Notebooks , April 1969.

6. The gateway to Europe

Barcelona was the gateway to Europe: from there, Mercedes and I traveled to London (where we learned English), Milan... We attended concerts, theater premieres, and I calmed all my cultural anxiety.