Gabriel García Márquez is being immortalized with a bronze statue in his native homeland…

Bogota City Hall will pay tribute to the country’s 1982 Nobel Literature laureate with a statue representing him as a young journalist erected in the gardens of Lievano Palace.

The Bogota Culture, Recreation and Sports Secretariat announced on its Web page the inauguration of the life-size statue of the 86-year-old Colombian novelist, screenwriter and journalist, fashioned in bronze according to the lost wax method by artist Julia Merizalde.

Merizalde won a district program to stimulate artistic production, a recognition that allowed her to design, fund and install the work of art in the gardens of the Lievano Palace, the seat of the Bogota City Hall, in a location it will share with the sculpture Cascade by Edgar Negret and El Quinde de la Paz by Ecuador’s Nixon Cordova.

Wearing a shirt, his unmistakable bushy mustache and glasses, Garcia Marquez’s image shows him as just another passerby in the garden of the city hall.

García Márquez, born in the Caribbean town of Aracataca, left his home region at a young age and came to Bogota to study law at the Universidad Nacional, although he soon dropped out to become part of the city’s intellectual life and work for the daily El Espectador.

The Culture, Recreation and Sports Secretariat is coordinating two-hour tours of the Lievano Palace in both the morning and afternoon so the public can see the statue, among other sites.

Known affectionately as Gabo throughout Latin America, García Márquez is the mastermind behind Love in the Time of Cholera, One Hundred Years of Solitude and Autumn of the Patriarch, among others.