MEXICO CITY (AP) — Long into the night, the line of mourners stretched for nearly a mile, waiting their turn to file into Mexico City’s majestic Palace of Fine Arts and bid farewell to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian Nobel laureate considered one of the greatest Spanish-language authors of all time.

Garcia Marquez, who died Thursday at age 87, was eulogized in a brief ceremony Monday evening in the dramatic art deco lobby by the presidents of both Mexico and Colombia, two countries linked by the writer through his birth, life, heritage and career. Though he was born in Colombia, Garcia Marquez lived in Mexico for decades and wrote some of his best-known works here, including “One Hundred Years of Solitude.”