Introduction: Caring for people at the end of life confronts nurses with challenges that extend beyond the technical dimension of clinical practice, requiring a continuous reconstruction of the meaning of caring. In this context, learning to care develops primarily through experience, leading to a progressive reconstruction of the meaning of caring.

Objective: To reflect on the process of learning end-of-life care by examining how experience contributes to the reconstruction of the meaning of caring and to the development of nurses' professional identity.

Methodology: This is a theoretical reflection article based on a qualitative phenomenological study conducted with nurses providing care to people at the end of life, complemented by a review of the international literature published between 2018 and 2025 in the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases. The search strategy included descriptors related to end-of-life care, nurses' experiences, the meaning of caring, and experiential learning, combined using Boolean operators.

Results: The analysis demonstrates that learning to care is not limited to acquiring specific clinical competencies but involves a progressive transformation in the way nurses understand the person, suffering, and the purpose of care. Experience promotes a gradual shift in focus from the disease to the person, fostering practice grounded in therapeutic presence, human dignity, critical reflection, and ethical responsibility, even when cure is no longer possible.

Conclusions: Learning to care at the end of life constitutes an ongoing process of reconstructing the meaning of caring, emerging as a fundamental component of nurses' professional identity and making an important contribution to the development of genuinely person-centred care.