Pope Leo XIV is due to land in Lima this evening for an emotional homecoming to Peru, the country where he spent more than two decades as a missionary priest and bishop before becoming pope.

The pontiff is scheduled to touch down at Callao Air Base at 5.30pm local time (10.30pm GMT) on Wednesday, ending the Argentina leg of his 12-day tour of South America and beginning a six-day visit to the land he still calls home. After a brief welcome ceremony, he will travel to the presidential palace in Lima to meet President Keiko Fujimori, before addressing the authorities, civil society and the diplomatic corps at the Gran Teatro Nacional.

Leo, the first Peruvian citizen to lead the Catholic Church, was born Robert Prevost in the United States and first arrived in Peru as a young Augustinian missionary in 1985. He became a Peruvian national in 2015, served as Bishop of Chiclayo from 2015 to 2023, and spent years travelling on horseback to remote Andean communities, distributing food during the Covid-19 pandemic and wading through floodwater in rubber boots to reach stranded families.

A homecoming weeks after lung surgery

The visit comes less than a month after the 71-year-old pope underwent surgery on 13 October to remove a malignant tumour from his right lung. His doctors cleared him to travel on 26 October, and the Vatican confirmed that the demanding itinerary, which includes a dozen flights and 40 speeches across three countries, would go ahead unchanged.

Peru has prepared for his arrival with fervour. A 14-metre statue of the pope with outstretched arms now towers over a seaside park in Callao, near the air base where his plane will land. Merchants in Lima are selling pope-themed shirts and souvenirs, and inmates at the country's largest women's prison have stitched velvet dolls bearing his likeness.

Before flying to Peru, Leo was due to celebrate a morning Mass at the shrine of Our Lady of Lujan, Argentina's most important Catholic devotional site, where pilgrims have been gathering for days, and to visit one of the country's largest prisons. His three days in Argentina also highlighted the Church's criticism of President Javier Milei's cuts to social programmes.

Three days in Chiclayo, his former diocese

The Peru leg is the longest and most personal part of the tour, which began in Uruguay on 6 November and runs until 17 November. After Lima, Leo will spend three days in Chiclayo, the northern city where he was bishop, and will also visit Cusco in the Andes and Pucallpa in the Amazon, before a closing Mass in Lima on 16 November.

His years in Chiclayo shaped the pastor Peruvians remember. During the pandemic, when Peru recorded more than 219,000 Covid deaths, he helped raise more than $380,000 with Caritas Chiclayo to buy two oxygen plants. He also led the Church's response to the arrival of more than 1.6 million Venezuelan migrants, setting up shelters and pressing for their legal status to be regularised so they could work.

“Leo XIV is a pope forged in Peru,” CNN reported, noting that his two decades in the country built the broad consensus that carried him to the papacy in the 2025 conclave. His closest collaborators at the Vatican include a priest from Chiclayo, and he addressed Peru in Spanish from the balcony of St Peter's Basilica within moments of his election.

A closely watched meeting with Fujimori

The meeting with President Fujimori will be closely watched. She was elected this year in one of Peru's closest elections, marred by fraud accusations and vote-counting delays, and she is the daughter of former President Alberto Fujimori, who ruled from 1990 to 2000 and died in 2024.

In 2017, when he was Bishop of Chiclayo, Leo publicly criticised the pardon granted to the former president, who had been convicted of serious human rights abuses, saying he should personally seek forgiveness from victims if Peru was to achieve genuine reconciliation. Analysts say his intimate knowledge of Peru gives him an unusual ability to speak about its political past.

“There's no other country where the pope is as attuned to the domestic politics of that country than Peru,” Martin Cassinelli, an analyst at the Atlantic Council, told Reuters. “If there's anything that could potentially be at odds with the current Fujimori government, it would be a reflection on the past.”

For many Peruvians, though, the visit is simply a homecoming. “It's not just a pastoral visit by the pope to his flock, but a visit to his home,” Jose Luis Guadalupe Perez, an academic at Peru's Pacific University, told Reuters. “He is bound to step on some toes.”