The first literary award bestowed by the House of Peruvian Literature went to Mario Vargas Llosa, in a ceremony held inside a building designed to move people across the Andes by rail. That a train station became the home of a national literary museum is the kind of repurposing that makes sense only in Lima, where history layers itself in ways that defy tidy categories. Desamparados Station sits on the southern bank of the Rimac River, next to the Government Palace, at the intersection of Ancash and Carabaya streets in the heart of the capital. It was built to be a gateway to the mountains. It became, instead, a monument to the stories Peru tells about itself.
The station takes its name from the Church of Our Lady of the Forsaken, which stood beside it until 1937. The Peruvian Corporation began the project in 1890, and three years later the Lima-La Oroya route was inaugurated, connecting the coastal capital to the mining towns of the central highlands. The line became known as the Ferrocarril Central Andino, one of the world's highest standard-gauge railways, climbing to over 15,000 feet as it crossed the Andes. The three-story station building that stands today was completed in 1912, the first major public work by Peruvian architect Rafael Marquina. Its construction employed reinforced concrete and expanded metal -- modern techniques for the era -- and the interior's crowning feature is an Art Nouveau stained glass skylight that floods the central hall with colored light.
Marquina designed the facade in the Beaux-Arts style, with five symmetrical vertical bodies divided by four classical pilasters. The building's elegance was deliberate: this was the front door to Peru's most ambitious engineering achievement, the railway that conquered the Andes, and it needed to project the same confidence as the iron and steam that powered the trains. The station also housed the presidential wagon Paquita, built in honor of the wife of President Oscar R. Benavides. Under the military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado in the late 1960s, the Peruvian Corporation was nationalized and replaced by ENAFER, a state-owned railway company. When ENAFER was privatized in the 1990s, the station passed to the Ministry of Transport in 1999, its platforms falling quiet as passenger rail service dwindled.
On October 20, 2009, President Alan Garcia inaugurated the House of Peruvian Literature inside the station, created by supreme decree the year before. Architect Juan Carlos Burga designed the museum's interior, while David Mutal took responsibility for preserving the building's original architectural character. The museum now occupies most of the station, hosting exhibitions that trace the arc of Peruvian literature from colonial chronicles to contemporary fiction. Since 2010, it has bestowed an annual award -- the first, fittingly, going to Vargas Llosa, the Nobel laureate whose novels capture Peru's social complexity with a density that matches the station's own layered history. The building even has an unlikely Hollywood connection: in the television series Pushing Daisies, a photograph of the station's facade was used as the exterior of a fictional convention center.
Desamparados is not entirely a museum piece. After reopening following the COVID-19 pandemic, the station operates a twice-yearly service of the Ferrocarril Central Andino during Holy Week and Peru's national holidays in July, carrying passengers on a dramatic ascent from sea level to the Andean highlands en route to Huancayo. The journey climbs through dozens of tunnels, crosses bridges over deep gorges, and reaches altitudes where the air thins noticeably -- one of the most spectacular rail journeys in South America. As of 2025, plans are underway to revive commuter rail service between Lima and Chosica, with Desamparados and nearby Monserrate station serving as terminals. Trains donated by California's Caltrain system have been stored at Monserrate, waiting for the project to advance. The station that was built to connect Lima to the mountains may yet find its purpose renewed, shuttling commuters through the capital's sprawling eastern suburbs.
Desamparados Station sits at 12.044°S, 77.029°W in Lima's historic center, immediately south of the Rimac River and adjacent to the Government Palace. From 3,000-5,000 feet AGL, the station's Beaux-Arts facade faces the river and is identifiable near the Presidential Palace complex. Jorge Chavez International Airport (SPJC/LIM) is approximately 7 miles to the northwest. The Ferrocarril Central Andino line extends eastward from the station, climbing rapidly into the Andes. Lima's coastal fog frequently limits visibility below 1,000 feet from June to November.