Mario Vargas Llosa Library

Welcome to San Francisco Street, in the heart of Arequipa’s cultural district. Take a look at these elegant sillar stone walls: at number 306, they house one of the great treasures of Spanish-language literature. Inside this colonial house lies the personal collection of Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Opened in 2014 with the author himself in attendance, the library holds more than 20,000 books gathered over a lifetime of reading and passion. As you make your way between the shelves, you’ll even see his desk preserved just as he left it, as though the writer had simply stepped out for a coffee. One of the highlights is an original copy of One Hundred Years of Solitude by his friend-turned-rival Gabriel García Márquez, heavily marked up and annotated by Vargas Llosa himself.

To understand the spirit of this place, it helps to know something about the remarkably eventful life of the man who was born in Arequipa in 1936. As a child, Vargas Llosa grew up believing his father was dead, only for him to reappear 10 years later. He was later sent to a military school in Lima, an experience that inspired his first masterpiece, The Time of the Hero.

From the heights of the Andes to a seat in the Académie française—and even a run for the presidency of Peru in 1990—Vargas Llosa helped shape world literature before his story came to an end in Lima in 2025, at the age of 89. Arequipa gave the world one of its greatest writers, and in return, he gave his books back to his hometown—perhaps the most fitting farewell he could have left behind.