Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

Gabriel García Márquez resisted all offers to turn his best-known novel, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” into a film. Though the Colombian writer loved cinema, he was wary of how Hollywood would reshape his 1967 book.

After his death a decade ago, though, his family agreed to allow Netflix to adapt the novel. His son, Rodrigo García, explained that Netflix had offered to create a Spanish-language series, filmed in Colombia, with a mainly Colombian cast — an approach that seemed to honor his father’s creation.

Before the first season of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (“Cien Años de Soledad”) was released last month, I traveled to Colombia to go behind the scenes of the series. In a multimedia project, which The Times published earlier this month, we showed how the directors approached the book’s magical realism, in which ghosts, flower storms and levitating characters appear amid everyday life.

I was born and partly raised in Colombia, and my father was Colombian. So I was curious about what it was like to film this series in Colombia, where García Márquez is generally revered: He appears on the 50,000-peso bill, and students memorize the first lines of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in school.

What did it mean to create Macondo, the imaginary town at the heart of the novel, in the author’s home country?

I flew from New York to Bogotá, then to the smaller city of Ibagué; Netflix had built Macondo on a cattle ranch on the city’s outskirts. To my surprise, the artificial town, with its view of the Andes Mountains, reminded me of real places.

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber? Log in.

Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

I.V.F. often costs tens of thousands of dollars. Policies to cover those costs would be difficult to implementttslot, experts said.