The Vatican has finalized the itinerary for Pope Leo XIV's first trip to Latin America as pontiff, an 11-day, three-country journey that will take him from Montevideo to Buenos Aires to the Peruvian diocese he led for years before his election to the papacy. The trip runs Nov. 6 through 17 and comes weeks after the Vatican confirmed the 70-year-old pope, born Robert Francis Prevost in Chicago, was cancer-free following earlier health concerns.

The first leg takes him to Uruguay from Nov. 6-8, with stops in Montevideo, Paysandú and the city of Florida. From there he travels to Argentina, Nov. 8-11, visiting Buenos Aires, Córdoba and the Marian shrine of Our Lady of Luján — marking the first papal visit to the country of his predecessor Pope Francis since Francis's death. The final and longest leg runs Nov. 11-17 in Peru, with stops in Lima, Chiclayo, Cuzco and Pucallpa, according to the schedule published by Catholic World Report and confirmed by Peru's state news agency Andina.

A return to the diocese he once led

Chiclayo carries particular weight: Leo served as bishop there for nearly a decade before Francis called him to Rome, and local officials have described the stop as one of the emotional centerpieces of the trip. On Nov. 16, the final full day of the journey, the pope is scheduled to visit a shelter for the elderly run by nuns before celebrating a closing Mass at the Las Palmas Air Base outside Lima.

A HOMECOMING, NOT JUST A VISIT

The trip was first announced in August and is being closely watched as Leo's first extended outing since Vatican doctors cleared him following a cancer scare earlier this fall. He had already skipped a planned appearance at an interfaith peace summit in Assisi in October while recovering, with Vatican officials stressing at the time that the Latin America trip remained on his calendar. Vatican-watchers note that an American-born pope choosing his first major foreign journey to be a return to his own missionary territory, rather than a stop in a larger, more symbolically obvious capital, signals how central his years in Peru remain to his sense of the papacy.

Vatican officials have cautioned that some specific stops could still shift as logistics are finalized in the coming days, but the broader three-country, three-leg structure of the trip is locked in. Security planning is already underway in all three countries, with Peruvian officials in particular bracing for large crowds in Chiclayo and Lima.