Background
The initial idea to write a book about Simón Bolívar came to García Márquez through his friend and fellow Colombian writer Álvaro Mutis, to whom the book is dedicated. Mutis had started writing a book called El Último Rostro about Bolívar's final voyage along the Magdalena River, but never finished it. At the time, García Márquez was interested in writing about the Magdalena River because he knew the area intimately from his childhood. Two years after reading El Último Rostro, García Márquez asked Mutis for his permission to write a book on Bolívar's last voyage.
García Márquez believed that most of the information available on Bolívar was one-dimensional: "No one ever said in Bolívar's biographies that he sang or that he was constipated ... but historians don't say these things because they think they are not important." In the epilogue to the novel, García Márquez writes that he researched the book for two years; the task was difficult, both because of his lack of experience in conducting historical research, and the lack of documentary evidence for the events of the final period of Bolívar's life.
García Márquez researched a wide variety of historical documents, including Bolívar's letters, 19th-century newspapers, and Daniel Florencio O'Leary's 34 volumes of memoirs. He engaged the help of various experts, among them geographer Gladstone Oliva; historian and fellow Colombian Eugenio Gutiérrez Celys, who had co-written a book called Bolívar Día a Día with historian Fabio Puyo; and astronomer Jorge Perezdoval—García Márquez used an inventory drawn up by Perezdoval to describe which nights Bolívar spent under a full moon. García Márquez also worked closely with Antonio Bolívar Goyanes, a distant relative of Bolívar, during the extensive editing of the book.
Read more about this topic: The General In His Labyrinth
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