Standing before the chestnut tree planted in the heart of the Buendía house, a visitor forgets she is on a film set. “So this is where Úrsula tied up José Arcadio to contain his madness,” she thinks, as if dropping in on an old friend rather than stepping onto the most ambitious television production ever mounted in Latin America. The illusion is so complete that the line between the fictional Macondo and the 56-hectare site in Colombia blurs: the blood trail of José Arcadio still runs to the kitchen with its copper pots, Melquíades’ workshop looks as though the alchemist has just set down his little gold fishes, and the railway station where striking banana workers were gunned down in 1928 stands silent and waiting.

This is the Macondo built by Netflix for its adaptation of ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’, a town that is itself a protagonist. Constructed in nine months and continuously reshaped over three years, the set employs 1,200 people, including 500 in the art department alone. A team of sixty tailors has produced 70,000 costume pieces, while a dedicated “greens” crew planted more than 20,000 plants by hand, irrigating even the grass verges to keep the drought at bay. The only tree not transplanted is the one in the central square. Street names honour members of García Márquez’s family: Calle Mercedes for his wife, Calle Sara Emilia for the cousin who carried love letters, Calle Margot for the grandfather’s natural daughter who ate wall plaster and inspired the character of Rebeca.

The first eight-episode part of the series debuted on 11 December 2024 and was, according to Italian news agency ANSA, an immediate worldwide success. Now the second and final part is set to arrive on Netflix from 5 August, with the last episode scheduled for 26 August. The new episodes will trace the arrival of progress and its consequences, as tensions among the younger generations of the Buendía family mount and the utopian town on the riverbank is transformed.

For the costume designer, Catherine Rodríguez, the challenge was not scale but fidelity: reconstructing a Caribbean that “feels real and authentic” from historical sources that are often ambiguous or simply absent. The carnival masks, for instance, drew on Barranquilla’s traditions and on Bamileke elephant masks from Cameroon, a thread connecting the Colombian Caribbean to its African roots. Such negotiations between the book’s suggestions, the directors’ visions, and the physical reality of an actor’s body define the production’s approach.

To walk through Macondo is to become an extra in a metaverse of magical realism. The set does not merely illustrate a story; it invites a kind of inhabitation. As the final episodes prepare to stream, the town remains alive, its details — a photographer’s shop named after the series’ director, a replica of the writer’s childhood home in Riohacha, the Ultramarinos Vesubio store where Gabo met the Italian who inspired Pietro Crespi — waiting for the Buendías to return one last time.