Netflix’s Sumptuous One Hundred Years of Solitude Brings Gabriel García Márquez’s Epic to Dazzling Life

We are living in a golden age of adaptation. From Shogun and 3 Body Problem to the Dune and The Sandman onscreen universes, stories previously thought too complex, daunting, or even downright weird for mainstream audiences are suddenly everywhere on streaming services and in local multiplexes, racking up critical acclaim, box office dollars, and hefty viewership figures left and right. Embracing a sort of risk-taking that’s vanishingly rare in the current entertainment world, these adaptations unflinchingly swing for the fences narratively and trust their audiences will come along with them. And while none of these adaptations are perfect—or even always particularly true to the letter of their source material—they’re gutsy as hell, and that is no small thing.

That same spirit animates Netflix’s sprawling adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s Nobel Prize-winning novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. A sixteen-episode limited series whose first half arrives this month, it not only recreates the lush atmosphere and shifting narrative threads of the novel but also its bone-deep sense of place and history. The fictional village of Macondo may not have ever truly existed, but it comes alive onscreen here, as feisty and full of contradictions as any of the characters who inhabit it. (And, not for nothing, but this show is also full of some of the most stunning visuals you’ll see this year.)

Long considered one of the great “unfilmable” stories, One Hundred Years of Solitude is not for the faint of heart. Set over a century and spanning seven generations of characters, the novel is one of the foundational texts of magical realism, using fabulous and often fantastical imagery to explore both deeply human experiences and broader existential questions. A story that wrestles with everything from logic and faith to doubt and superstition, it’s a romance, a war story, a family saga, a historical drama, an exhortation against corruption, a treatise on the fluidity of memory, and so much more. Basically, it’s a whole lot, is what I’m saying. But series writers José Rivera, Natalia Santa, Camila Brugés, and Albatros González pull off what should be impossible: A surprisingly faithful adaptation that, while it may veer from its source material at times—the novel itself contains surprisingly little dialogue, for example—manages to get the weird, untameable spirit of García Márquez’s tale exactly right. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude follows the rise and fall of the Buendía family—and through them, everything. Theirs is not just the story of sons and daughters, but a house, a town, a people, and even a history. But it starts with a single couple: Young lovers José Arcadio Buendía (Marco Antonio González) and Úrsula Iguarán (Susana Morales), a pair whose family disapproves of their plans to wed. They are cousins, after all, and family lore insists that the children of such unions will be born with pig tails. The couple decide to marry anyway, but when José Arcadio kills a villager who makes a crude joke at their expense, the young pair strikes out on their own, determined to leave the past and the judgment of their families behind. 

After years of travel—sometimes spent literally wandering in circles—the Buendías and those who followed after them settle on a largely unremarkable, unclaimed patch of land. Thanks to a vision of a city of mirrors, José Arcadio declares their new home will be called Macondo. The group builds houses and plants crops, crafting a village so egalitarian that no one’s house or patch of garden receives more sun or shade than another’s. A dreamer more interested in alchemy and scientific experiments than how to feed his children, José Arcadio has little desire to take up the leadership role many try to thrust upon him. His impractical attitude is completely the opposite of Úrsula’s pragmatic and self-sufficient nature, and she is the person who largely keeps their family afloat, juggling building a growing candy business alongside raising their three children, José Arcadio (Thiago Padilla), Aureliano (Jerónimo Echeverría), and Amaranta (Luna Ruíz). 

As the series continues, the family expands, introducing several new generations of Buendías, most of which are also named some variations of José Arcadio, Úrsula, Aureliano, and Amaranta. Alongside them grow both Úrsula’s carefully planned housing renovations—the family’s thatched-roof starter residence slowly transforms into a palatial, tiered estate—and the city of Macondo itself. As more residents arrive, fragments of the real world trickle in along with them, in the form of a governmental magistrate, a priest of the Church, a band of gypsy merchants, and then political partisans, who are swiftly followed by elections, revolutionaries, and a war. These events are deftly woven through and around the lives of the Buendías themselves, who bear up under tragedy, celebrate triumphs, mourn painful losses, and welcome newcomers, including an illegitimate grandchild and a feral orphan (Nicole Montenegro) who arrives on the family doorstep carrying the bones of her dead parents in a burlap sack. 

One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of similarly striking, weird imagery, bringing visuals from the novel to haunting, powerful life onscreen: A rainfall of bright yellow flowers as an act of near-celestial mourning, a snaking trail of blood that announces a key death, an inexplicable gunshot wound, a priest that levitates. This is a story in which ghosts and magical plagues exist neatly alongside bloody revolutionary battles and intimate family betrayals, but the show is perhaps most remarkable for the way it refuses to talk down to its audience or soften its ambitious themes. Questions of power, corruption, envy, desire, greed, autonomy, and isolation feel as timely and necessary as ever, and the slow decay of Macondo—and the idealistic world it once represented—is heartbreaking to watch unfold. 

Shot entirely in Colombia with a predominantly Colombian cast, these eight episodes represent just the first half of García Márquez’s magnum opus and conclude with many of the story’s major characters yet to be introduced. (The second batch will presumably arrive next year.) But there’s no shortage of standout characters and performances here. ​​Claudio Cataño’s turn as the adult Colonel Aureliano Buendia is mesmerizing, capturing the contradictions inherent in an impassioned man who longs for something greater than himself but who relentlessly seeks it in the most thankless and hopeless of places—marriage to a girl too young to understand romance, a war that will seemingly never end. Akima Maldonaldo is a whirlwind throughout as the fierce adult version of the wild young Rebeca who once arrived on the Buendias’ doorstep. But it is Marledy Soto who steals the show as the elder Úrsula, the fierce matriarch who holds both the Buendias and the larger world of Macondo together. Playing the proverbial straight man to her the more fantastical, idealistic elements of her family is often a thankless task, but Soto’s performance contains multitudes and runs the gamut from fury to heartbreak. 

Like the book it is based on, One Hundred Years of Solitude doesn’t always make it easy for those seeking to plumb its depths. The sprawling cast of characters who often have variations of the same name, the lengthy episode runtimes, and the occasionally non-linear timeline that jumps between not only past and present but reality and…something else entirely—they can all feel challenging for audiences who are perhaps unused to having to work quite so hard to watch television. (Like most foreign language properties, this is also a show that is best watched in its original language with subtitles.) But the result is a journey that’s well worth taking, and one that will likely stay with you long after the final credits roll. 

Part 1 of One Hundred Years of Solitude premieres on Netflix on Wednesday, December 11.

Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter and Bluesky at @LacyMB

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