Biblioteca Joanina

High on the hill of Coimbra, in the old courtyard of the university known as the Paço das Escolas, stands one of the most opulent library interiors in Europe. The Biblioteca Joanina takes its name from King John V of Portugal, who began it in 1717; it was finished in 1728, and the design is credited to João Carvalho Ferreira. A portrait of the king painted by Domenico Duprà in 1725 presides over the rooms, a reminder of who paid for all this splendour.

The main floor is a sequence of three rooms linked by decorated arches, each lined with two-tier bookcases. Each room has its own ground colour, green in the first, red in the second and black in the third, and against it gold chinoiserie, the fashionable Oriental motifs of the day, glitters on every surface. The ceilings, by the Lisbon painters António Simões Ribeiro and Vicente Nunes, are peopled with figures of the arts and sciences, with Divine Wisdom at the centre. Much of the timber is exotic hardwood brought from Brazil. It is theatrical, dense and glittering, a room made to impress rather than to read in, and it holds some 200,000 volumes on medicine, geography, history, law, philosophy and theology, among them a 48-line Latin Bible printed in 1462.

The building is also cleverly practical. Its walls are more than two metres thick and its great door is teak, which together keep the interior at a steady 18 to 20 °C with moderate humidity, good conditions for old paper. The oak used inside was chosen partly because it deters insects. And the library keeps a famous night shift: a colony of bats lives in the building and comes out after dark to eat the insects that would otherwise feed on the books, and the tables are covered with hides at night and cleaned each morning. Below the reading rooms are two further floors, including the old Academic Prison, where students who broke university rules were once locked up; the visit includes it. The Paço das Escolas around it also holds the Hall of Capelos, the Chapel of São Miguel and the university tower.

Getting there

The library stands in the upper town of Coimbra, about 0.6 km from the city centre, and is reached on foot up the steep lanes of the old town. The nearest airport by straight line is the small Viseu aerodrome (VSE), about 73 km away; the practical gateway is Porto Airport (OPO), about 130 km by road. From Porto, the Alfa Pendular and intercity trains stop at Coimbra-B station on the Lisbon–Porto line, and a shuttle or a twenty-minute walk links it with the city centre.