Realismo Mágico: Caribbean stories in a place of their own
A Spanish-language home for my fiction, legends and essays from the Colombian Caribbean, built to be read slowly.
Read the stories ↗- A website for my fiction, Caribbean myths and essays on magical realism, written in Spanish.
- Every story shows its genre, date and reading time before the first line, so a reader knows what they are choosing.
- It is the latest of four versions of the site I have built around my books.
Why it exists
Magical realism is not a genre where I come from, it is how people tell what happened on the street yesterday. A fisherman cursed to live as half man and half caiman. A bride who haunts Puerto Colombia. I grew up with those stories and I write them down.
I wanted them to live somewhere that feels like them, not inside a social feed that buries a story in a day. The site is a quiet shelf: you arrive, you pick a story, you read.
How it works
Each story opens like the first page of a book: a full-width illustrated cover, a large serif title, then the author, the date and the minutes it takes to read. Under it, a short summary and one button. Nothing else competes.
The home page works as a shelf. The most recent stories come first, a trending strip shows what readers open most, and genres like drama, thriller and fantasy help someone choose by mood. Legends and essays on the history of magical realism sit in the same place as the fiction.
A Turismo section sits next to the stories, because many legends belong to real towns, like Plato in Magdalena or Puerto Colombia.
Read a story on realismomagi.co
Start with a legend if you want something short, or with “El Amargor de la Tierra” if you want fiction. Everything is in Spanish.
Open realismomagi.co ↗What I learned
A reading page needs less design, not more. Calm type, honest reading times and an image that sets the mood were enough. Every extra element took attention from the story.
I also learned the limit of building alone: a site is not an audience. The code is the easy part. The habit of publishing is the work, and it is the part of this project I am still improving.
Founding Product Designer in Barranquilla. I design and build with early-stage founders. More about me →