It was foreseen that the city of mirrors (or mirages) would be wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men at the precise moment when Aureliano Babilonia would finish deciphering the parchments, and that everything written on them was unrepeatable since time immemorial and forevermore, because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.

This sentence comes from the closing pages of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel *Cien años de soledad* (*One Hundred Years of Solitude*), where the Buendía family saga reaches its apocalyptic end. Aureliano Babilonia, the last of the line, finally deciphers the prophetic parchments of Melquíades, which have encoded the entire history of Macondo in advance. As he reads, the prophecy coincides with its fulfillment: Macondo—already a place of illusion, repetition, and forgetting—is annihilated by a wind that erases it from human memory. The passage crystallizes the novel’s circular structure and its meditation on history, solitude, and the fragility of collective remembrance.

The quote fuses revelation with extinction: understanding arrives only at the instant when it can no longer change anything. Macondo is figured as a “city of mirrors (or mirages),” suggesting both reflection (history repeating itself) and illusion (a world built on misrecognition and myth). The “unrepeatable” nature of what is written underscores the novel’s fatalism: the Buendías’ patterns—incest, obsession, isolation, and amnesia—are not redeemed by knowledge. The final maxim, that “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth,” universalizes the family’s tragedy into a warning about societies that cannot learn from their own histories and therefore vanish into oblivion.