Roaming and Reading: Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Colombia

We've started a segment on The Daily Circuit called Roaming and Reading. It's a mash-up of two things Kerri loves: literature and travel.

In this installment, we travel to the Colombian city of Mompos, a favorite of author Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Our guide is travel writer Nicholas Gill. He recently wrote about Mompos in The New York Times:

The first time I heard of Mompos, officially called Santa Cruz de Mompox, was about a decade ago, while reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "The General in His Labyrinth." "Mompox doesn't exist," Mr. Garcia Marquez wrote, "we sometimes dream about her, but she doesn't exist." For years, I assumed that to be true.

It wasn't until 2008, when an acquaintance, a British journalist in Colombia named Richard McColl, began building a hotel there, that I realized that Mompos -- a perfectly preserved colonial city nearly 500 years old, set on an island in the Magdalena River -- was indeed real. In fact, the region, rich in history and ripe with romanticism, was the setting of many of Mr. Garcia Marquez's most famous works.