Catalina Recavarren Viewpoint

At the cliff’s edge above the Pacific Ocean, there is an open platform with a canopy and a semicircular wooden railing. The project for it was given to the city free of charge, and the municipality made this place publicly accessible. A pedestal with a commemorative plaque preserves the name of the poet for whom the platform was named.

The dedication appeared here before the viewpoint itself. On May twenty-fifth, nineteen eighty-seven, members of Barranco’s Ronda Panamericana association planted a tree at the edge of the cliff. They placed soil brought from different countries of the Americas beneath its roots. The tree was dedicated to Catalina Recavarren Ulloa de Zizold—a native of Barranco, a poet, and an organizer of literary associations who traveled through countries in the Americas and Europe, as well as the Soviet Union, giving lectures and readings.

By then, Recavarren had already been publishing for more than half a century, but she did not live on literary fame alone. She wrote scripts for a children’s program on Radio Nacional del Perú, then did cultural work at a women’s teacher-training school. Alongside children’s verse, she published poetry about the female body and desire—material that Peru’s literary world long left to men. A year before the tree was planted, eighty-two-year-old Recavarren compiled the Anthology of Peruvian Women, bringing together under one cover works by fifty women writers who were rarely included in general histories of literature. The soil from different countries referred precisely to this part of her work—to her travels, readings, and efforts to connect writers across borders.

Only at the end of the following year was a full-fledged viewpoint created here. Arturo Solís Málaga designed the project and gave it to the city free of charge, and under Mayor Pedro Alemán Centeno, a public platform with a canopy and a semicircular wooden railing was built at the cliff’s edge. So people first chose this spot to honor a living poet, and then a place from which people came to look at the Pacific Ocean grew up around the dedication.

Catalina Recavarren died in Barranco on May eleventh, nineteen ninety-two. Ronda Panamericana decided to make permanent the tribute begun during her lifetime and asked the Municipal Council of Barranco to give the viewpoint the poet’s name. On September twenty-ninth, the council granted the request. So the name did not go to the designer or the mayor: the public space was named for a woman whose literary work her fellow residents had already honored here with a tree.

A pedestal with a commemorative plaque to Catalina Recavarren stands on the platform. The current official inventory does not specify what became of the tree planted in nineteen eighty-seven, so it cannot confidently be identified with any one of the trees here. The plaque preserves the outcome of that story: first soil from countries of the Americas was placed beneath the roots, and five years later the poet’s name appeared on the map of Barranco.