Macondo
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Macondo is a fictional Colombian town described in Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is located in a jungle in the north of Colombia, to the west of Riohacha. It is the home town of the Buendía family.
The town first appears in García Márquez's short story Leaf Storm, which describes a Macondo appearing as it does near the end of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He has since used Macondo as a setting for several other stories.
In the narrative, the town grows from a tiny settlement with almost no contact with the outside world, to eventually become a large and thriving place, before a banana plantation is set up. The effects of this lead to Macondo's painfully long downfall, followed by a gigantic windstorm that wipes it from the map. As the town grows and falls, different generations of the Buendía family play important roles, contributing to its development.
The fall of Macondo came mostly as a result of a four year rainfall, which destroyed most of the town's supplies and image. During the years following the rainfall, the town begins to empty, as does the Buendía home.
Inspired by William Faulkner's fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County, Macondo draws from García Márquez's childhood town, Aracataca. Macondo was the name of a banana plantation near Aracataca, and means "banana" in the Bantu language.