List of Famous people born in Arequipa, Peru

Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa, more commonly known as Mario Vargas Llosa, is a Peruvian writer, journalist, essayist, college professor, and a former politician. Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading writers of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. In 2010 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature, "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat."

Manuel Rubén Abimael Guzmán Reynoso, also known by the nom de guerre Chairman Gonzalo, is a Peruvian Maoist, the former leader of the Shining Path during the Maoist insurgency known as the internal conflict in Peru. He was captured by the Peruvian government in September 1992 and sentenced to life imprisonment for terrorism and treason.

Hernando de Soto Polar is a prominent Peruvian economist known for his work on the informal economy and on the importance of business and property rights. His work on the developing world has earned him praise worldwide by numerous heads of state, particularly for his publication The Mystery of Capital. He is the current president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), a think tank devoted in promoting economic development in developing countries located in Lima, Peru.

Mariano Lorenzo Melgar Valdivieso (1790–1815) was a Peruvian revolutionary, poet, artist, translator and patriot soldier during the Peruvian War of Independence from Spain. As a poet, Melgar became one of the most prominent romantic poets of Peru in the 19th century history, best known for his poetic love songs known as yaravíes. He is often considered to be the equivalent of the Ecuadorian José Joaquín Olmedo and the Cuban José Martí as patriots of their respective countries.

Ricardo "Ricky" Tosso Febres was a Peruvian actor born in Arequipa.

Pedro Eleodoro Paulet Mostajo was a Peruvian diplomat who claimed to be the first person to build a liquid-propellant rocket engine and modern rocket propulsion system.

Vladimiro Lenin Ilich Montesinos Torres is a former long-standing head of Peru's intelligence service, National Intelligence Service (SIN), under President Alberto Fujimori. In the year 2000, the infamous "Vladi-videos" came to light through the television: they were secret videos recorded by Montesinos that showed him bribing elected congressmen into leaving the opposition and joining the pro-Fujimori group of the Congress. The ensuing scandal caused Montesinos to flee the country and prompted Fujimori's resignation.

Joaquin Alberto Vargas y Chávez was a noted Peruvian painter of pin-up girls. He is often considered one of the most famous of the pin-up artists. Numerous Vargas paintings have sold and continue to sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Óscar Ramírez Durán, commonly known as Comrade Feliciano, is a Peruvian convicted terrorist and former political leader who led the Shining Path, a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist terrorist group in Peru, in the 1990s.

José Huerta was a Peruvian politician who served as Minister of Defence from 2 April 2018 until his death.