CARTAGENA, Colombia – Colombian Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez traveled from Mexico, where he lives, to this Caribbean resort city for a rest, according to wife Mercedes Barcha, who denied that the writer is having serious health problems.

“We’ve been in Cartagena for six days. This is the time we always choose to come to Cartagena and we’re going to stay a little while, about five or six months,” confirmed Barcha in remarks to Efe.

The wife of the author thus refuted the rumors that have been circulating for the past few days in Colombia that Garcia Marquez is suffering from Alzheimer’s and had returned to the country of his birth with serious health problems.

“I don’t know where this thing about Gabito’s illness came from,” said Barcha, referring to her 82-year-old spouse.

Garcia Marquez was born in Aracataca, a small town in northern Colombia, on March 6, 1927, and in 1982 he received the Nobel Literature Prize after establishing himself as the best-known Latin American author with the publication of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” a novel written and published with much economic difficulty in Mexico.

Currently, Garcia Marquez keeps his principle residence in Mexico City, but he divides his time among Paris, New York and Cartagena, where he continues to preside over a journalism foundation. EFE