Remains of García Márquez's wife will rest in Cartagena with the Nobel Prize winners

Through a statement, the University of Cartagena confirmed that this Friday, March 25, a private event will be held in the Cloister of La Merced, the final disposal of the ashes of Mercedes Barcha, the widow, muse and guardian of the Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel García Márquez, will be made.

He passed away on August 15, 2020 in Mexico City. His death was confirmed by his son Rodrigo Garcia, who noted that for many years he had suffered from respiratory problems.

The urn with the ashes of “La Gaba”, as her closest friends told Barcha, had not been transferred to Colombia to be buried next to those of the award-winning writer, to whom she was married for 56 years, due to restrictions imposed by the covid-19 pandemic.

The ceremony for the final disposal of Barcha's ashes in the cloister will be “a private event, not a small one, because they had a very big world of friends,” explained Rodrigo García Barcha, the eldest of his children.

“Friends come from Mexico, from Bogotá, from the United States, from Spain,” said García Barcha during a meeting with journalists in Barranquilla where he is the central guest of the 16th International Festival of the Arts.

Gabriel García Márquez also died in Mexico City, on April 17, 2014 and his ashes were deposited on May 23, 2016 in a memorial built in his honor in the Cloister of La Merced, of the University of Cartagena, the city where he lived when he was young, he began to work in journalism and which was the source of inspiration for his work.

It should be noted that Gabo and Mercedes lived in love with Cartagena, a city that inspired the Nobel Prize to write, such as the works “Love in the Time of Cholera”, “Love and Other Demons”.

Cartagena was also the stage to make their dreams come true, as is the case of the New Journalism Foundation (FNPI), a school for journalists from around the world.

García Barcha, who dedicated his life to cinema and who came to present his film “The Last Days in the Desert (2015), said that at the ceremony they will “say a few words, say goodbye to 'La Gaba', for now and place the ashes next to those of Gabo”.

The memorial, which contains the ashes of the Colombian Nobel Prize and from today also those of his wife, includes a bust of the writer that was sculpted by the British artist Katie Maurray and installed on a floating platform built in the central courtyard of the Cloister of La Merced, a Spanish construction from the times of the Colony.

The couple married in 1958 and two years later they settled in Mexico City where García Márquez wrote “One Hundred Years of Soledad,” whose publication would not have been possible without Mercedes Barcha, who pawned everything she could from home to raise the money needed to send the work to the Buenos Aires publishing house, Gabo said.

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