A Holographic Vargas Llosa

Visiting the birthplace of Mario Vargas Llosa in Arequipa offers an experience as literary as it is futuristic. Within the colonial walls of the house where the Nobel laureate was born, a striking hologram of the writer greets visitors. It does so with his own voice, amidst family portraits and 19th-century furniture, inviting guests to explore the rooms that witnessed the early days of the future author.

In 2014, after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, Vargas Llosa returned to his hometown and, together with his brother-in-law Lucho Llosa Urquidi—brother of his wife, Patricia Llosa—decided to transform the family home into a museum. "We tell the story of a great storyteller with his own voice, adding more emotion and authenticity to the museographic journey," explains Llosa Urquidi, an audiovisual producer and the mind behind the new presentation.

The mansion, located on what is now Alameda Mario Vargas Llosa—formerly Bulevar Parra—is the very place where the writer was born on March 28, 1936, and where he lived for just a year. In the master bedroom, the bed where his mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, gave birth to him is preserved. Above this canopied bed, a second hologram theatrically recreates the birth: a midwife urges the mother to push, while visitors observe a scene that blends history, emotion, and technology.

During his first year of life, young Mario lived with his maternal grandparents, Pedro and Carmen Llosa. The house retains the original furniture and some childhood items, such as a wooden rocking horse and his first typewriter, also a toy.

The only child of Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, an authoritarian military man whom he believed dead during his childhood, Vargas Llosa did not meet his father until he was eleven. "You either become a priest or a soldier. Being a writer is for sissies," his father told him when young 'Marito' began contributing to the newspaper La Crónica. That rejection did not deter a vocation that would eventually lead him to the Nobel Prize.

On the occasion of the International Congress of the Spanish Language, the house museum has been completely renovated. The tour combines cutting-edge technology—immersive projections and interactive resources—with personal items, documents, testimonies from the writer himself, and recreations of the spaces where his life unfolded: his room at the Leoncio Prado Military School, the bar from 'Conversation in The Cathedral', the brothel from 'The Green House' inspired by a real one, and his apartments in Paris and London.

Visitors can view the original manuscripts of The Time of the Hero and The Green House, carefully preserved by the family. King Felipe VI viewed them during a private visit to the museum and inaugurated a new room titled 'The Immortal', in reference to the recognition granted by the French Academy to Vargas Llosa.

The reopening was accompanied by a tribute organized by the Vargas Llosa Chair, the Cervantes Institute, and the RAE. Morgana Vargas Llosa, the writer's daughter, presented the Cervantes Institute with the feather-shaped trophy her father won in 1985 for the Ritz Hemingway Prize. The piece will be added to the Cervantes' Caja de las Letras as part of the author's legacy.

The family also donated to the RAE a figure of a hippopotamus—a quintessential 'Vargasllosian' animal—symbolizing the humor and sensuality that permeate the Nobel laureate's work. Vargas Llosa collected hippos for their admired voracity in eating, sexuality, and vitality, and their danger, traits he said also embodied the writer's profession.