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

They were flown home from Mexico where he had lived for years and where he died in 2014 at the age of 87.

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.

"It's a day of joy mixed with sorrow," his sister Aida Rosa Garcia Marquez told the French news agency AFP.

"But there is more joy than sorrow because to see a brother get to where Gabito reached can only bring joy."

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.

"Cartagena is the city where the Garcia Marquez family is based. It is where my grandparents are buried." said Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, one of the author's two sons, from France where he now lives in an interview with AFP.

"It seemed natural to us that his ashes should be there too."

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.