GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ - NOVELIST MARQUEZ SNUBBED BY HOMETOWN

Nobel laureate novelist GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ has been snubbed by the population of his hometown who are refusing to change its name to that of his famous fictitious location MACondo. Aracataca in Colombia quashed proposals to rename the community Aracataca-MACondo - the setting of ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE - in a referendum on Sunday (25JUN06). Although 3,342 voted for the change and only 250 opposed it, 7,000 votes were needed to make the result stick. The lacklustre response led the town's mayor, and fervent pro-change campaigner, PEDRO SANCHEZ to concede, "Turnout was not high enough for the vote to count." In the acclaimed novel, MACondo is a place of bizarre happenings, including four-year rainfall after a massacre of banana workers, and a plague of insomnia. Marquez, 79, spent his early years in Aracataca with his grandparents and credits the place with inspiring his fiction. He was reportedly unfazed by the result.