Netflix to make 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' series

In this March 6, 2014 file photo, Gabriel Garcia Marquez greets fans and reporters outside his home on his birthday in Mexico City. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo, File)

NEW YORK -- Netflix has acquired the rights to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," one of the most celebrated novels of the 20th century.

The streaming company announced Wednesday that it will adapt the 1967 book into a Spanish language series. "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which has sold an estimated 47 million copies and been translated into 46 languages, has never before been adapted for the screen.

The series will be shot largely in Colombia, Netflix said. Garcia Marquez's sons, Rodrigo Garcia and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, will serve as executive producers.

While other Garcia Marquez novels have been turned into films such as "Love in the Time of Cholera" and "Chronicles of a Death Foretold," the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist doubted how the expansive and mythical "One Hundred Years of Solitude" could be adapted. Garcia Marquez died in 2014.

"For decades our father was reluctant to sell the film rights to 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' because he believed that it could not be made under the time constraints of a feature film, or that producing it in a language other than Spanish would not do it justice," Garcia said. "But in the current golden age of series, with the level of talented writing and directing, the cinematic quality of content, and the acceptance by worldwide audiences of programs in foreign languages, the time could not be better to bring an adaptation to the extraordinary global viewership that Netflix provides."

The Oscar-winning "Roma" and the Pablo Escobar series "Narcos" are among the Spanish-language originals that have been successes for Netflix.

"One Hundred Years of Solitude" is about multiple generations of the Buendia family told across a century. It's considered one of the greatest works of magical realism, a genre Garcia Marquez popularized in which the fantastical and the real were wedded as one.