Two boys play football in front of a mural
of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Aracataca
Photograph: Fernando Vergara/AP
So the people of the Colombian town of Aracataca, the model for Gabriel Garcia Marquez's fictional Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude, will not be changing the town's name in honour of the author. It's somehow appropriate to Marquez's sleepy setting that the referendum to rename the town Aracataca-Macondo failed to go through because too few people could be bothered to vote - except that in Marquez's magic-realist world this would have resulted in some glorious mistake, with Aracataca becoming Nuneaton, say.

Mind you, Nuneaton has its own claim to literary fame in George Eliot, who was born there in 1819. There is a Middlemarch Business Park in nearby Coventry (the development of which features in that novel) and a statue of the author in a square in Nuneaton itself. George Eliot refers to Nuneaton as a place called Milby in her early novels. Perhaps the local dignitaries should take a leaf out of the mayor of Aracataca's book and see if the populace are up for a change.

They might face some opposition from nearby Bedworth, however, which also claims Eliot affiliations; she was actually born, real name Mary Ann Evans, midway between Bedworth and Nuneaton. And you certainly wouldn't want to change Bedworth to Milby because it already has a perfectly good substitute name in "Beduth", a local pronunciation which has foxed many a literary tourist.

People have long flocked to places made famous by writers and their works. Fair enough if the good folk of Macondo - sorry Aracataca - want gently to discourage this. There is nothing so tedious as a literary hanger-on, as Wordsworth knew when he protested the coming of the railway to his beloved Lake District in 1847. "Is there no nook of English ground secure/From rash assault?" he wrote, fearing that the number of gawpers peering over the garden wall at his sister Dorothy and himself would increase exponentially. It did, but the other side of the ecological coin is that the Lakes have been accorded protected status in part because of Wordsworth's fame.

Maybe Aracataca, which has its own environmental issues - it is dominated by the bleak banana monoculture of the Chiquita company - has made a mistake after all?