Abstract. General relativity predicts that space-time near the horizon of a large black hole is smooth. On the contrary, the requirement that information is preserved during Hawking evaporation, suggests that quantum effects in gravity may dramatically modify the interior of a black hole, not only at the singularity but all the way to the horizon. I will present a proposal, inspired by the AdS/CFT correspondence, which could potentially reconcile the smoothness of the horizon with the recovery of information during black hole evaporation.