Letters sent to García Márquez to be shown in Mexico City

• One of Gabriel Garca Márquez’s granddaughters discovered a mystery box in his photo archives.
• There were 150 letters from famous people, including Fidel Castro and Pablo Neruda.
• Some of the letters will be on display in Mexico City starting June 16.

One of Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel Garca Márquez’s granddaughters discovered a mystery plastic box with the word “grandchildren” scribbled on its label while going through his photo archives.

Emilia Garca Elizondo was initially hesitant to open the box, but her curiosity won out. There were 150 letters from Chilean artist Pablo Neruda, former US President Bill Clinton, Cuban President Fidel Castro, and actor Robert Redford among the 150 letters he got.

Starting June 16, forty of the letters will be on display in a colonial house in Mexico City’s southern outskirts, where Garca Márquez lived with his wife, Mercedes Barcha, from the 1980s until his death in 2014.

The exhibition is part of celebrations for the 40th anniversary of his winning the Nobel literature prize. Another event, which includes the exhibition “Gabriel García Márquez: The Making of a Global Writer,” will open on June 18 in Mexico’s Museum of Modern Art.

“I’m 32 years old and all this continues to impress me,” García Elizondo, who is director of the García Márquez foundation, told The Associated Press, describing her shock at finding the box in a cabinet on the second floor of her grandparents’ house. She had passed the cabinet many times without paying much attention to it.

The finding surprised Garca Márquez’s family, who assumed all of the writer’s letters and personal correspondences were in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, which has the largest collection of the writer’s archives.

“One never expects to find this kind of thing even though one already knows who Gabo is … I will always think that Gabo does everything like magic,” she said. García Márquez is known affectionately in Latin America as Gabo.