The ashes of the late Nobel Prize winning novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, have been laid to rest in the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena.

According to the BBC, they were flown home from Mexico where he had lived for years and where he died in 2014 at the age of 87.

The funeral was attended by 400 guests, including the President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos.

A ceremony was held in the cloisters of Cartagena University, near Garcia Marquez's family home in the city.

He is best known for his magic realist novels "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "Love in the Time of Cholera."

A bronze bust of the writer was unveiled by the writer's son Rodrigo Garcia Barcha in the centre of the cloisters of the university as the centrepiece of the memorial.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez was born in the town of Aracataca near Colombia's northern Caribbean coast and started working as a journalist in the late 1940s in Cartagena.

He had lived since the 1980s in Mexico but his family decided he should be buried in Cartagena where many of his family members were also interred.

Garcia Marquez had a love-hate relationship with Cartagena; the city appears in several of his novels often depicted as a decadent place full of conflict with a class-ridden and racist society.