Livraria Lello

Interesting facts

The 8-by-3.5-metre skylight above the staircase is made of 55 glass panels and was designed by the Dutch-born artist Gerardus Samuel van Krieken.

The painted figures of Art and Science that flank the upper windows of the facade are the work of the Belgian artist Joseph Bielmann.

Small rails and a wooden cart once used to move books between the shelves are still set into the floor of the shop.

The business traces back to 1869, when Ernesto Chardron opened his Livraria Internacional on nearby Rua dos Clérigos; he died at just 45.

Beyond selling books, the Lellos ran a major publishing house that issued the Lello Universal encyclopedia and works by Camilo Castelo Branco.

About 1.2 million people visited the shop in 2019, and in 2016 nearly 3,000 came through its door on an average day.

The Guardian ranked it the third most beautiful bookshop in the world in 2008, and Lonely Planet placed it third among the world's best bookshops in 2011.

In November 2022 the shop bought 42 letters written by the young Bob Dylan in the 1950s at a New York auction, paying more than half a million euros.

In 2020 J. K. Rowling, who lived in Porto in the early 1990s, said she had never set foot inside the shop.

Why it is worth it

Behind a narrow white facade on Rua das Carmelitas, a short walk from the Clérigos Tower, Porto hides one of the most theatrical interiors in the Iberian book trade. The shop is small, but everything in it is pulled upwards: tall dark shelves climbing to the ceiling, a gallery running around the upper floor, and at the centre a staircase that does not so much connect the two levels as perform between them — a forked, curving flight in deep red, splitting and rejoining as it rises, its carved balustrades as intricate as the bookcases around it.

The Lello story begins in the 1880s, when José Lello and his family took over and expanded a Porto bookselling business founded by a Frenchman, Ernesto Chardron. The present building was designed by the engineer Francisco Xavier Esteves and opened in 1906. Its facade mixes Neo-Gothic forms with Art Nouveau touches. Inside, almost nothing is what it seems: the ornate "woodwork" of ceiling and walls is largely painted plaster, and the famous staircase is reinforced concrete — one of the earliest uses of the material in Portugal — originally finished to imitate timber and only later given its signature red.

Look up before you look at the books. Above the stair a large stained-glass skylight, some eight metres long, floods the room with coloured light and carries the owners' monogram and the motto Decus in Labore — "dignity in work". Busts of Portuguese writers — Eça de Queirós, Antero de Quental, Camilo Castelo Branco among them — watch from the walls. The shop is often linked to Harry Potter, but J. K. Rowling has said plainly that the bookshop was not an inspiration. It hardly needs the legend: few rooms anywhere make the business of selling books look so much like a ceremony.

Getting there

Livraria Lello is in central Porto, about 0.4 km from the city centre, a couple of minutes' walk from the Clérigos Tower in the old centre. Francisco de Sá Carneiro Airport (OPO) is about 13 km away.

Plan your visit

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Livraria Lello

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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