At the end of the 19th century in Cartagena, a marine port in Colombia, Florentino Ariza falls in love at first sight of Fermina Daza.

They secretly correspond and she eventually agrees to marry but her father discovers their relationship and sends her to distant relatives. When she returns some years later, Fermina agrees to marry Dr. Juvenal Urbino, her father's choice.

Their fifty year marriage is marked by roughly equal amounts of love and anger.

Fermina's marriage devastates Florentino, but his mother makes him marry a willing widow and he discovers that being with his beloved is a very good pain reliever.

He begins to number and describe each of his women, beginning with #1, the widow, and eventually has over 600 names and notes. He also decides to be as successful and rich as Dr. Urbino and, when the doctor dies suddenly, immediately renews his courtship of Fermina.

Gabriel Garcia Marquis

Author of the book Love in the times of Cholera

Gabriel García Márquez
The Nobel Prize in Literature 1982

Born: 6 March 1927, Aracataca, Colombia

Died: 17 April 2014, Mexico City, Mexico

Residence at the time of the award: Mexico

Prize motivation: "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."

Language: Spanish

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, Colombia. As a 13-year-old, he came to Bogotá to study in a secondary school. Later he began to study law, but abandoned these studies to work as a journalist and writer. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Paris, New York and elsewhere. In the late 1960s he left journalism to devote himself to his creative writing full-time. Eventually García Márquez settled in Mexico City, where he lived until his death.