COLOMBIA will pay tribute to the Nobel-prize winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez in a ceremony at Bogota’s national cathedral tomorrow.

    His relatives have confirmed, however, that they will be at a memorial ceremony at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, where he lived for more than 30 years, today.

    Colombians feel that the man many consider to be the country’s greatest son must be honored in his homeland.

    The writer fled the country in 1981, after learning that Colombia’s military wanted to question him over alleged links with the country’s left-wing guerrillas.

    Garcia Marquez was cremated in a private ceremony in Mexico.

    Presidents and fellow writers paid tribute to his legacy.

    U.S. President Barack Obama said the world had “lost one of its greatest visionary writers.”

    Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos took to Twitter to pay tribute to Garcia Marquez. “A thousand years of solitude and sadness because of the death of the greatest Colombian of all time! Such giants never die,” he wrote.

    Peruvian Nobel Prize-winning author Mario Vargas Llosa called him a “great writer.” Chilean author Isabel Allende said: “I owe him the impulse and the freedom to plunge into literature. In his books I found my own family, my country, the people I have known all my life, the color, the rhythm, and the abundance of my continent.” (SD-Agencies)