Buendía family

Buendía family, fictional founders of Macondo, the South American town that is the setting of the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (originally in Spanish, 1967) by Gabriel García Márquez. Seven generations later they are also the last inhabitants of the isolated village.

Many years before the action of the novel begins, generations of inbreeding by the Buendías produced a child with a pig’s tail. The family fears a recurrence of this event, but each generation is hopelessly drawn into incestuous unions. Úrsula Iguarán and José Arcadio Buendía, who are first cousins, marry and found Macondo. Succeeding generations produce, among others, the liberal Colonel Aureliano, who starts and loses 32 revolutions; Arcadio, a local dictator whose firing squads help him maintain order; Remedios the Beauty, who is assumed into heaven in a cloud of yellow butterflies on an otherwise ordinary day; and José Arcadio Segundo, a labour leader whose followers are massacred. Stability and snobbery characterize the family’s women. As the town decays and the family begins to die out, Amaranta Úrsula and her reclusive nephew Aureliano mate, and Amaranta bears a pig-tailed son; mother and son both die, thus ending the Buendía dynasty.