Introduction: Health promotion (SP) encourages changes in the environment that help promote and protect health. These changes include creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, developing personal skills, reorienting health services, and developing healthy public policies. This is where the importance of health-promoting universities comes from, who are in charge of supporting and executing institutional policies to promote and maintain health-promoting actions, in this way the development of work and social environments will be influenced, promoting positive transformations in health and well-being of the university community Objective: to identify the characteristics of the health promotion approach in experiences of the Latin American university environment, during the period from 2000 to 2020. Methodology: a narrative review was carried out with publications of scientific articles and gray literature extracted from scientific databases, repositories institutional and reliable websites, including those in Spanish, English and Portuguese. Results: 32% of the reviewed publications include the concept of PS and only in 13% of them, this concept is related to what is stated in the Ottawa Charter. Different shortcomings were found in the recognition and implementation of the concept and characteristics of health promotion. Of the strategic areas of the HP, there was a greater incidence in the development of personal skills and the creation of healthy environments, with little applied (or poorly applied) the reorientation of health services, the creation of healthy public policies and the reinforcement of health services. citizen action. Also, insufficiencies were reflected in other characteristics of the SP, such as the focus on the social determinants of health, intersectorality and interdisciplinarity. Conclusion: Among the characteristics reviewed in this project, the deficient inclusion of the PS concept and the implementation of its strategic areas and other characteristics stand out. The confusion that exists in this concept was identified, since it is related to prevention and health education, in addition they do not take into account key aspects such as the social determinants of health and interdisciplinary and intersectoral work.