The historic city where it all began

The ashes of Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez have been laid to rest in the historic port city of Cartagena, Colombia, where he began his writing career.

Family members of García Márquez, friends and local residents attended the unveiling of a bronze bust of the author at a colonial convent in Cartagena on Sunday. The bust is located on top of a commemorative stone on which part of the ashes of Gabriel García Márquez are laid. The rest of the ashes will remain in Mexico, where the writer lived for decades and died in 2014. The fortified city of Cartagena was the setting for one of Marquez's best-selling novels, Love in the Age of Cholera.

The Colombian writer's family still maintains a beachfront home in the town, as well as a foundation he set up to train journalists in Latin America. Gabriel García Márquez was one of the most important writers in the Spanish language. He is the author of numerous literary works, the most famous of which are "One Hundred Years of Solitude", "There is no one to write to the colonel" and "The Autumn of the Patriarch". His epic novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" from 1967 sold more than 50 million copies and was translated into more than 25 languages.

He was also considered a hero of Latin American leftists as an early ally of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro and a critic of American interventionism around the world, from Vietnam to Chile.