Macondo does not exist. That is the first thing to know before setting off on its trail, and it is precisely why travelling through Colombia in the footsteps of One Hundred Years of Solitude works better than most literary tours. You are not looking for an address. You are looking for the landscape a book was born from.

The occasion is the series' second season, whose first seven episodes came out on 5 August, with the finale scheduled for 26 August. The story has moved into the last generations of the Buendia family, and the town itself changes with it. The Macondo we see was built from scratch in the Tolima department, near the municipality of Alvarado, across around 17,000 square metres with more than a hundred separate structures.

The set was conceived as a living organism. The streets, houses and shops change as the decades pass, from mud and reed construction towards colonial and republican styles, following the town's rise and decay. On some facades the names are a tribute to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's relatives. The set is not open to visitors, but Alvarado, 28 kilometres from Ibague, has meanwhile become a place fans travel to as if on pilgrimage.

The real beginning, though, is not there.

If you want to understand Macondo, you set out from Aracataca, around 80 kilometres from Santa Marta. That is where Marquez spent his childhood and where the image he later immortalised began to take shape. The house-museum is a reconstruction of the family home, and through it you recognise characters and events from the novel. All around there are murals, sculptures and references to the work at every step.

Garcia Marquez lived there only until the age of eight. Those first memories were enough for everything he wrote afterwards. The book's influence is such that in 2006 a referendum considered changing the municipality's name to Macondo. The proposal failed, but the idea alone says plenty about the relationship between literature and reality there.

From there the road opens out across the country. In La Guajira there are deserts, dunes and horizons that never end - Cabo de la Vela, the Taroa dunes and the culture of the Wayuu people, one of the symbols of Colombia's Caribbean coast. To the south-west, Cesar and the Perija mountains offer the exact opposite picture: mountains under dense vegetation and the proximity of Valledupar, the capital of vallenato music.

The journey ends in Cundinamarca, with lagoons, waterfalls and forests. Among the most visited points are Lake Guatavita, tied to the legend of El Dorado, and the La Chorrera waterfall, one of the highest in the country. Both are easy day trips from Bogota.

A Macedonian reader who opened the book at seventeen and got lost in the names of four generations of Buendias is unlikely to make it to Aracataca. But there is something familiar in the story of a place the world knows only through what one writer wrote down. The Balkans have plenty of villages we know exclusively from books. The difference is that here nobody has tried to rename them after the novel.