Since the publication of Mario Vargas Llosa’s final novel in 2023, literary studies have increasingly recognized the need for a comprehensive reassessment of the Peruvian writer’s poetics and for identifying the structural constants in his work. This study explores the role and symbolic significance of the road in Vargas Llosa’s biography and early novels. The beginning of his literary career coincided with the Latin American «Boom» of the 1960s, a period marked by intense travelling and transatlantic intellectual exchange. Working in Europe and writing about his native country, Vargas Llosa became an ideal example of cultural extraterritoriality – a characteristic shared by many Latin American intellectuals of the time. During this period, he drew inspiration from J. Martorell’s chivalric novel «Tirant lo Blanc». Vargas Llosa rethinks the structure of the chivalric romance, creating his own total novel in which the topos of the road assumes a key role. Vargas Llosa’s early works are inhabited by characters who constantly shift locations: the cadets in «The Time of Heroe», the wandering «anti-knights» in «The Green House,» and the heroes of «Conversation in the Cathedral» and «Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,» whose events are set against the writer’s native Peruvian backdrop. This contrasts with his later works, in which Vargas Llosa actively shifts locations. Symbolically, his final novel, «I Dedicate My Silence to You,» returns to Peru, and the writer himself passed away in Lima in 2025. The topos of the road thus reflects both a biographical trajectory and a broader paradigm of Latin American extraterritoriality. Methodologically, the article combines the biographical method, the phenomenological approach and the approaches of B. Castany Prado and P. Sanchez.