Literary travel: Culture and Travel Context

Literary travel is a form of tourism centered on great works of literature, literary movements, the literature surrounding cultural and political movements, or beloved authors. Just pick your favorite writer and do a little research: they all lived somewhere!

A huge country with a wide host of major giant writers widely scattered apart. Jorge Amado comes from Bahia and writes mostly about Salvador with its huge bay and Ilhéus with its cocoa plantations. José de Alencar comes from Fortaleza, Paulo Leminski from Curitiba, father Érico and son Luis Fernando Verissimo from Porto Alegre, Guimarães Rosa from inner Minas Gerais and a whole lot of them from the former capital Rio de Janeiro. In Ipanema, check out Vinicius de Moraes street, named after the poet who was drinking with songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim at a bar, when a gorgeous blonde passed by. Together they seized the inspiration and wrote "The Girl from Ipanema". The bar is still there, renamed "Garota de Ipanema". As for the girls, Jobim once remarked wisely "...as you get older, they keep getting prettier and prettier...."

Any little Anne can visit the actual Green Gables in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island; visitors come from as far afield as Japan. Stratford and Niagara-on-the-Lake are known for their live performances of Shakespeare and Shaw respectively, despite the real Stratford-upon-Avon being in the United Kingdom. Statues paying homage to "Winnie", the real life inspiration for A.A. Milne's Winnie the Pooh, stand in Winnipeg's Assiniboine Park and in her hometown of White River (Ontario)

Various sites in Canada and the US recall Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Underground Railroad era, including the home of Rev. Josiah Henson (Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site in Dresden, Chatham-Kent), the First Parish Church in Brunswick (Maine), the author's home (Harriet Beecher Stowe House & Library in Hartford, Connecticut, USA), a Harriet Beecher-Stowe House in Cincinnati and the author's grave site in Andover (Massachusetts).

Gabriel García Márquez set Chronicle of a Death Foretold in the beautiful city of Santa Cruz de Mompox. If you're a big fan, go to his birthplace at Aracataca, the inspiration for Macondo.

A number of authors of both Spanish and English language novels set their stories in Mexico. One of the most famous was Laura Esquivel's Como Agua Para Chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate), which is set in the Northern Mexico state of Chihuahua during the violent period of the Mexican Revolution. Pulitzer-Prize winner John Steinbeck set his novel, The Pearl in the fishing community of La Paz in Baja California, Steinbeck's story is a universal tale of greed and sorrow. Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez loved fellow writer Juan Rulfo's novel, Pedro Paramo, so much that he's said to have memorized it word for word so that he could recite it forward or backward. Rulfo's novel is a story of Comala, Colima's history, told through the empty eye sockets of the town's dead. Those literary types sure are a bucket of laughs, aren't they! (An annual arts festival is held in Rulfo's home town of Sayula.)

If it's poetry that trips your literary trigger, the two biggest names in Mexico are Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a nun who wrote during Mexico's tumultuous colonial period and Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz if you want a more modern style of poetry.

The country's most prestigious literary event is the annual Guadalajara International Book Fair, held in late November to early December. It regularly attracts more than 1 million visitors and features keynote speakers from the world's top writers. Although George R.R. Martin was the keynote speaker in 2016, there is no truth to the rumor that half the audience ended up dead and dismembered in gruesome ways. More than 2,000 publishers take part in the exhibition at the Guadalajara Expo Center.

The proud home of Rubén Darío whose birthplace has since been named in his honor. León, a longtime home of the poet, hosts a museum dedicated to his legacy. Another treasure of Nicaraguan folklore is "El Güegüense" a work of popular theater pitting native wit against Spanish might. The 1979 Nicaraguan revolution and subsequent civil war also produced quite a bit of poetry and music with names like Ernesto Cardenal, Gioconda Belli and the Mejia Godoy brothers known the world around. Cardenal spent large parts of his life on Solentiname.

Peru had a number of successful writers during the 20th century, but the best known is Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2010. He received critical acclaim for his book, The Time of the Hero, though his novel The Green House is usually regarded as his most popular work. (His daughter, Maria Vargas Llosa, is also a writer.) If your literary interest runs more to poetry, look for works by César Vallejo, who wrote in the early 20th century.

This cultural overview is an excerpt of a community travel guide. Confirm current access, schedules and prices with the venue before planning a visit.

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Text adapted from Literary travel by Wikivoyage contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.