Early life of Gabriel García Marquez

García Márquez billboard in Aracataca: "I feel Latin American from whatever country, but I
have never renounced the nostalgia of my homeland: Aracataca, to which I returned one day
and discovered that between reality and nostalgia was the raw material for my work".—
Gabriel García Márquez

Gabriel García Márquez was born on 6 March 1927[b] in the small town of Aracataca, in the
Caribbean region of Colombia, to Gabriel Eligio García and Luisa Santiaga Márquez Iguarán.
[6] Soon after García Márquez was born, his father became a pharmacist and moved with his
wife to the nearby large port city of Barranquilla, leaving young Gabriel in Aracataca.[7] He
was raised by his maternal grandparents, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán and Colonel Nicolás
Ricardo Márquez Mejía.[8] In December 1936 his father took him and his brother to Sincé but
when his grandfather died in March 1937, the family moved first (back) to Barranquilla and
then on to Sucre, where his father started a pharmacy.[9]

When his parents had fallen in love, their relationship was met with resistance from Luisa
Santiaga Márquez's father, the Colonel. Gabriel Eligio García was not the man the Colonel
had envisioned winning the heart of his daughter: Gabriel Eligio was a Conservative, and had
the reputation of being a womanizer.[10][11] Gabriel Eligio wooed Luisa with violin
serenades, love poems, countless letters, and even telephone messages after her father sent her
away with the intention of separating the young couple. Her parents tried everything to get rid
of the man, but he kept coming back, and it was obvious their daughter was committed to
him.[10] Her family finally capitulated and gave her permission to marry him[12][13] (The
tragicomic story of their courtship would later be adapted and recast as Love in the Time of
Cholera.)[11][14]

Since García Márquez's parents were more or less strangers to him for the first few years of
his life,[15] his grandparents influenced his early development very strongly.[16][17] His
grandfather, whom he called "Papalelo",[16] was a Liberal veteran of the Thousand Days
War.[18] The Colonel was considered a hero by Colombian Liberals and was highly
respected.[19] He was well known for his refusal to remain silent about the banana massacres
that took place the year after García Márquez was born.[20] The Colonel, whom García
Márquez described as his "umbilical cord with history and reality",[21] was also an excellent
storyteller.[22] He taught García Márquez lessons from the dictionary, took him to the circus
each year, and was the first to introduce his grandson to ice—a "miracle" found at the United
Fruit Company store.[23] He would also occasionally tell his young grandson "You can't
imagine how much a dead man weighs", reminding him that there was no greater burden than
to have killed a man, a lesson that García Márquez would later integrate into his novels.[24]
[25]
García Márquez's grandmother, Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes, played an influential role in
his upbringing. He was inspired by the way she "treated the extraordinary as something
perfectly natural."[26] The house was filled with stories of ghosts and premonitions, omens
and portents,[27] all of which were studiously ignored by her husband.[16] According to
García Márquez, she was "the source of the magical, superstitious and supernatural view of
reality".[21] He enjoyed his grandmother's unique way of telling stories. No matter how
fantastic or improbable her statements, she always delivered them as if they were the
irrefutable truth. It was a deadpan style that, some thirty years later, heavily influenced her
grandson's most popular novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude.[28]