After the feared consummation of incest that leads to the birth of the baby with a tail, the deaths of Amaranta Úrsula and her son will free Aureliano Babilonia to fulfill his destiny: deciphering Melquíades' manuscripts. In this episode, Nadia Celis and her guests analyze the end of the Buendía lineage in relation to key themes in One Hundred Years of Solitude: time, love, and the power of literature in the face of the "unavoidable" repetition of history. Jaime Abello, co-founder with Gabriel García Márquez of the Gabo Foundation, and Álvaro Santana Acuña, a researcher of the global rise of this novel, also discuss the book's writing process, its trajectory, and García Márquez's legacy beyond this masterpiece.

The devastation of Macondo by the flood is deepened in Chapter 17 of One Hundred Years of Solitude with the death of Úrsula. “The Solitude of Úrsula” is a tribute to the invisible heroines of the novel and the real women whose personalities and stories inspired them. In this unique episode, Nadia Celis speaks with María Margarita Mockler, a niece of Gabriel García Márquez, about the role of memory within the family that nurtured “Gabito’s” stories. Together, they also explore the lives of her aunts —the real women who inspired the Buendía women— whose legacy has defied the tragic fate of the novel’s female characters.

The events that would deliver the fatal blow to Macondo take center stage in Chapter Fifteen of One Hundred Years of Solitude. That’s when the Colombian state teams up with the United Fruit Company to brutally suppress the workers’ strike through a massacre—and then strategically erase it from memory. In this episode, Nadia Celis is joined by Paula Cuéllar, and Elvira Sánchez-Blake to unpack the long-lasting impact of state violence and the evasion of truth in addressing recent armed conflicts in Colombia and Latin America. Through the eyes of mothers who, like Úrsula, are weary of bringing children into the world only for them to go off to war, and who have dedicated their lives to demanding justice, this conversation sheds light on how history keeps repeating itself, fueled by the “plague of forgetfulness.