An intimate and sentimental report on the women's penitentiary in Lima, Santa Monica, famous for housing inmates from all over the world, mainly drug traffickers.
For a year, Marco Avilés visited this penitentiary and reconstructed the stories of 15 inmates, including drug traffickers, thieves and murderers. In its pages alternate terrible, delirious and moving scenes, where the "fearsome criminals" share their intimacy: from love dreams to projects of redemption but also of revenge. With them, we ask ourselves: What is a prison really for?

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About the book:

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I found "Día de visita" by Marco Avilés and I couldn't put it down. It is a series of chronicles based on interviews with inmates of the Santa Monica prison in Peru. I was fascinated by the approach it allows to the multiplicity of identities, stories, sufferings and contrasts that confinement brings into contact. The book illuminates with sobriety and sharpness the dignity that the testimonies protect from violence, despair and helplessness. Avilés allows us to see, from an angle little attended, one of the crudest facets of being a woman in Peru today.
-Ethel Barja Cuyutupa. Poet, professor at Salisbury University.

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Visiting Day (Seix Barral, 2023) by Marco Aviles has just been republished and it is great news because it deserves to have more readers. The Peruvian reporter interviewed about 50 inmates at the Santa Monica prison, in one year, on Saturdays and found a myriad of stories, between impressive, moving and outrageous. There is a meticulous work of the asphyxiating, dirty, corrupt and discriminatory environment of the penitentiary establishment. The book of chronicles, perhaps the best that Avilés has written, shows a reality that, in spite of being exposed in the media, does not change and remains in a latent silence.
-Bryan Paredes. Correo

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Despite the fact that prisons are exploited in movies and series as the setting for adventures, they rarely delve into the impact of the lack of affectivity of prisoners as part of their sentence. To remedy this, Peruvian author Marco Aviles wrote "Visiting Day", a recently republished work in which he portrayed the humanity of the inmates and which he leafs through in search of memories. The writer walks along the walls finished in barbed spirals, witnesses that a prison is hidden inside, the women's prison of Chorrillos in Lima, where he went every Saturday for a year to immerse himself in the life of the inmates, a diary of testimonies that gave rise to "Día de visita" (Visiting Day).
​-Paula Bayarte. EFE