Gabriel García Marquez's two love novels are inspired by a real place, Cartagena de Indias. Borrowing a phrase from García Márquez, “Cartagena is such a beautiful city that it seems like a lie."
Cartagena was one of the first cities founded by the Spanish on the Caribbean coast. The Colombian port and colonial city has inspired many of Gabriel García Márquez's novels, stories, chronicles and reports. This was the city where Márquez began his career as a writer, in the newspaper “El Universal.” In the 1940s, the Nobel Prize winner wrote some of his best chronicles and reports as a journalist for “El Universal.” Both the novel, "Love in the Time of Cholera," and its film adaptation take place in Cartagena.