"The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World" (Spanish: "El ahogado más hermoso del mundo") is a magical realist 1968 short story by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez.
[1] One Wednesday morning, children in a small fishing village of "about twenty-odd wooden houses" find a body on the beach that is covered with "Flotsam, jetsam, lagan, and sea debris".
The children play by burying him in the sand until the adults discover the corpse and decide that it must be given a small funeral and thrown off the cliff on which their village rests.
The man is too tall to fit easily into any house and, upon removing the seaweed and mud, the women observe his handsome face.
The women feel pity and sympathy for the man, who they silently compare to their own husbands, and they begin to weep for him.
The men are unable to find any relatives of the drowned man and they return home, where the village continues the funeral preparation as a group.