Hundred years of solitude tells the history of the Buendía family along six generations in the fictitious Macondo village. The village is founded by diverse families led by José Arcadio Buendía and Ursula Iguarán, a cousins'' marriage who got married filled of predictions and fears for being relatives and for the myth that existed in the region by which his descent could have a pig tail. Notwithstanding this fact, they had three sons: José Arcadio, Aureliano and Amaranta (names that will repeat in the generations that follows). José Arcadio, the founder, is the person who leads and investigates with the news gypsies bring into the village, and it ends his life tied up to the tree to where the ghost of his enemy reaches, Prudencio Aguilar, with whom he talks. Úrsula is the matriarch and chief of the family, who lives over one hundred years taking care of the family and home. The village starts growing little by little and with this growth arrive inhabitants of the other side of the marsh (area that surrounds and isolates the people from the outside, as it happens in his Aracataca, Colombia, where he was born). With them, the commercial activity and the construction increases in Macondo. Unfortunately, there comes also the pest of the insomnia and the pest of the oblivion. The loss of memory forces its inhabitants to create a method to remember things and Aureliano begins to label all the objects in order to remember its names; nevertheless, this method starts failing when the persons also forget how to read. Until one day when Melquíades (the leader of the gypsies and friend of José Arcadio) returns with a magic drink to re-establish the memory that takes effect immediately, and in gratitude is invited to stay living in the house. When the civil war breaks out, the inhabitants takes active part in the conflict by sending a resistance army lead by colonel Aureliano Buendía (the second son of José Arcadio), to fight against the conservative regime (or Goths, as they’re disparaging called). In the village, meanwhile, Arcadio (grandson of the founder and son of Pilar Ternera and José Arcadio) is designated civil and military chief by his uncle, and he turns into a brutal dictator, who is executed when the conservatism takes up the power again. The war continues and colonel Aureliano is saved from dying in several opportunities, until, tired of fighting without a meaning, he arranges a peace agreement that will last up to the end of the novel. After the agreement is signed, Aureliano shoots in the breast, but he survives. Later, the colonel returns home, moves away from politics and devotes himself to manufacture gold fishes locked in his workshop, from where he goes out only to sell them. Aureliano Triste, one of seventeen sons of colonel Aureliano Buendía, installs an ice factory in Macondo, leaves his brother Aureliano Centeno in charge of the business and leaves the village with the idea of bringing the train.
He returns after a short while, fulfilling his mission, which generates a big development, since with the train, there come also the telegraph, the gramophone and the cinema. Then the village turns into an activity center in the region, attracting thousands of people of diverse places. Some newly come foreigners begin a banana tree plantation next to Macondo. People prospers until a strike in the banana plantation takes place; in order to finish with it, the national army shows up and the workers who protest are murdered and thrown into the sea. After the massacre of the banana tree workers, the people is besieged by the rains that extend for four years, eleven months and two days. Úrsula says that she waits for the end of the rains to finally die. Aureliano Babilonia is born, the last member of the Buendía’s (initially referred as Aureliano Buendía, until he later on from the parchments of the mysterious Melquíades, a kind of Merlin magician, discovers that his father’s surname is Babilonia). When the rains endÚrsula dies and Macondo remains desolate. The family is reduced and in Macondo noboby remembers the Buendías; Aureliano devotes himself to decipher Melquíades''s parchments in the laboratory, until his aunt Amaranta Úrsula, with whom he has a romance, comes back from Brussels. From this romance, Amaranta Úrsula becomes pregnant and has a child who, when being born, he discovers that he has a pig tail; she dies drained off after the childbirth. Aureliano Babilonia starts desperately knocking door to door, but Macondo is now a deserted village and he only finds a bar owner who offers him a gin, and then he felt asleep. When awakening he remembers the new born child and he runs looking for him, but when arriving he finds out that the ants were eating him. Aureliano remembers that this was predicted in Melquíades''s parchments and he finishes deciphering the Buendía’s story that there was already written there in advance, finding out that, when finishing reading them he would end up his own story, his life and with him, the story of that Macondo, which disappears in the night of the times forever....