José Arcadio Buendía kills Prudencio Aguilar in a dispute and flees with Úrsula and other families to found the town of Macondo.

Wanderer Melquíades brings magnets, a telescope, and alchemy equipment to Macondo, becoming José Arcadio Buendía's closest intellectual companion.

Orphaned Rebeca arrives in Macondo carrying her parents' bones in a bag and unknowingly spreads an insomnia plague through the town.

Aureliano Buendía courts the magistrate's young daughter Remedios Moscote and marries her as soon as she comes of age.

Remedios Moscote dies of blood poisoning while pregnant with twins, becoming the first of many Buendías to die in childbirth.

Aureliano seizes the town's military garrison, names himself Colonel Aureliano Buendía, and departs to join the Liberal revolutionary forces.

The younger José Arcadio marches out with a shotgun and threatens the firing squad, freeing Colonel Aureliano Buendía from execution.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía signs the Liberal armistice ending the civil war and immediately shoots himself in the chest inside his tent.

Aureliano Triste arrives in Macondo with the town's first train, bringing electricity, the telephone, and a link to the outside world.

Without telling Aureliano Segundo, Fernanda del Carpio secretly delivers Meme to a convent and leaves her there permanently.

The banana company's military massacres striking workers gathered in Macondo's town square; José Arcadio Segundo is the sole survivor.

A torrential rainstorm falls on Macondo for nearly five years, destroying most livestock and leaving the town half-abandoned and rotting.

Aureliano Segundo and his twin José Arcadio Segundo die at the exact same moment, their parallel lives ending together.

Amaranta Úrsula gives birth to a pig-tailed infant — the fulfillment of the family's oldest fear — and dies of blood loss.

Aureliano decodes Melquíades's ancient parchments as a hurricane rises and wipes Macondo and the Buendía family from the face of the earth.

The Buendía family saga begins when José Arcadio Buendía kills a man and flees to found the remote town of Macondo with his wife Úrsula. Across multiple generations, the family is defined by war, ambition, and the arrival of outside forces that slowly reshape their isolated world. Colonel Aureliano Buendía rises as a Liberal revolutionary, survives execution, and ultimately retires in disillusionment, setting a pattern of solitude the family cannot escape. A foreign banana company brings prosperity and then catastrophic violence, while a five-year rainstorm leaves Macondo half-ruined and abandoned. The later generations watch the family home decay around them, unable to reverse a fate set in motion at the very beginning. When the last Buendía child is born bearing the mark of incest, the ancient prophecy of wanderer Melquíades is finally fulfilled and a hurricane erases Macondo from the earth.

The founding and fall of Macondo's Buendía dynasty.

José Arcadio Buendía explores the jungle in search of a route to the capital and discovers an ancient Spanish galleon stranded far inland.

Úrsula returns to Macondo after searching for her eldest son, bringing news of a neighboring village and a newly discovered route to the capital.

Melquíades returns to Macondo after dying in Singapore and introduces José Arcadio Buendía to the daguerreotype, which he hopes will prove God's existence.

A government magistrate arrives in Macondo, orders all houses painted blue, and marks the town's first confrontation with external state authority.

Pietro Crespi arrives to repair the Buendía family's pianola, and both Rebeca and Amaranta fall fiercely in love with him.

Arcadio rules Macondo as a tyrant after the Colonel departs, imposing military service, imprisoning the priest, and shooting dissenters.

Pilar Ternera, horrified by Arcadio's advances, sends the virgin Santa Sofía de Piedad to his bed in her place.

The Conservative army captures and executes Arcadio after he refuses a colonel's warning to surrender Macondo without a fight.

Petra Cotes arrives in Macondo organizing raffles and becomes the shared mistress of both Buendía brothers before settling exclusively with Aureliano Segundo.

José Arcadio Segundo's attempt to open a navigable river route to Macondo fails; instead he brings French women and a carnival to town.

Liberal shouts at the carnival trigger a massacre that kills many attendees and covers Fernanda del Carpio's dress in blood.

Remedios the Beauty floats upward into the sky while folding sheets in the garden and is never seen again.

Assassins hunt down and kill all seventeen of Colonel Aureliano Buendía's sons; only Aureliano Amador escapes by fleeing into the mountains.

Meme gives birth to a son in the convent, and a nun delivers the infant Aureliano to the Buendía house without explanation.

Young Aureliano discovers his infant son's corpse being devoured by ants in the Buendía house's inner courtyard.

While headline events define the Buendía dynasty, the story is equally driven by the quieter scenes that shift its direction. From José Arcadio Buendía's jungle discoveries to the arrival of outside rulers and opportunists, Macondo's isolation is steadily eroded long before the railroad arrives. Characters like Arcadio, Petra Cotes, and José Arcadio Segundo each reshape the family's fortunes in ways that go unrecognized until it is too late. The magical and the mundane collide repeatedly — in Remedios the Beauty's unearthly ascension and in a carnival that ends in bloodshed. By the time the banana company's workers are massacred and Meme's son is delivered to the decaying household, the Buendía line is already unraveling. The pool closes as the last Aureliano discovers the tragic consequence of the family's final act of incest.

The hidden forces and overlooked moments that shaped Macondo's fate.

Úrsula smashes José Arcadio Buendía's astrolabe in frustration after he neglects his family and community duties for his obsessive experiments.

The insomnia plague spreads through all of Macondo, and townspeople paste written labels on everyday objects to fight encroaching memory loss.

Father Nicanor Reyna demonstrates miraculous power by levitating several inches off the ground after drinking a cup of hot chocolate.

Don Apolinar Moscote removes Liberal votes from the ballot box after the election, awakening Aureliano's resolve to fight as a revolutionary.

Pietro Crespi dies by suicide a month after Amaranta rejects his marriage proposal and refuses to offer any explanation.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía returns to Macondo and discovers Arcadio's three surviving children, including the mysterious and beautiful Remedios the Beauty.

Colonel Aureliano Buendía loses interest in the war and orders aides to draw chalk circles marking ten feet around him at all times.

Before signing the armistice, Colonel Aureliano Buendía burns all his poetry and destroys every personal possession in the family home.

Úrsula scolds Aureliano Segundo for reckless spending, and he retaliates by wallpapering her entire house with one-peso banknotes.

Amaranta receives a vision of her own death, calmly finishes weaving her shroud, has herself measured for a coffin, and dies as predicted.

Fernanda has a guard posted in the backyard under the pretense of stolen chickens; the guard shoots and permanently paralyzes Mauricio Babilonia.

José Arcadio Segundo wakes among dead workers on a moving cargo train and returns to Macondo to find no official record of the massacre.

Teenagers who attended José Arcadio's nude parties return to the house, drown him in the bath, and steal the hidden sacks of gold.

Pilar Ternera recognizes young Aureliano as Colonel Aureliano Buendía at her brothel and tells him Amaranta Úrsula is waiting for him.

Pilar Ternera dies in her brothel and is buried beneath its floor, ending the longest life most deeply entangled with the Buendía family's fate.

Beneath the surface of the Buendía family saga lie the decisions and revelations that quietly determine everything. A broken astrolabe, a fraudulent election, and a rejected marriage proposal each redirect the story in ways no character fully understands at the time. The Colonel's disillusionment unfolds through the chalk circles he draws around himself and the poetry he burns before surrender — private acts that signal the collapse of everything he fought for. Later generations repeat the pattern: Amaranta weaves her own shroud without fear, a guard's bullet shatters Meme's future, and a lone survivor finds his memories of a massacre officially erased. By the time teenagers murder José Arcadio in his bath and Pilar Ternera sends the last Aureliano toward his fatal love, the family's doom has already been written in Melquíades's parchments. Pilar's death in her brothel marks the quiet end of the one life most deeply woven into the Buendías' fate.

The key decisions, discoveries, and emotional breaks that sealed the Buendías' destiny.