Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading

Behind a carved stone façade on a narrow street in central Rio de Janeiro lies one of the most spectacular reading rooms in the world. The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura – the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading – opens into a tall hall walled entirely with dark wooden bookcases, rising through galleries towards a skylight held in an iron frame. A great chandelier hangs in the middle, and the light filtering from above falls on tens of thousands of leather spines, turning the whole room into something between a chapel and a treasure chest.

The institution was founded in 1837 by Portuguese immigrants, as the first association of their community in the city, to keep their language and literature alive far from home. The present building was put up between 1880 and 1887 to designs by the architect Rafael da Silva e Castro. Emperor Pedro II laid the first stone, and Princess Isabel and her husband opened it. The style is Neo-Manueline, a 19th-century revival of the exuberant Portuguese late Gothic of the Age of Discoveries. The façade takes its cue from the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, and its stone was carved in Lisbon and shipped across the Atlantic. Statues of four heroes of the Portuguese voyages and letters – Pedro Álvares Cabral, Luís de Camões, Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama – stand on the front.

Inside, the collection of around 350,000 volumes is said to be the largest of Portuguese literature outside Portugal, and its rarities include an edition of Camões' epic Os Lusíadas printed in 1572, the year of its first publication. The iron structure of the skylight was the first of its kind in Brazil.

Rio's historic Centro, where the library stands, is a crowded district of 18th- and 19th-century churches, cafés and office towers, the oldest part of a city that was for a long time the capital of Brazil. The Real Gabinete is a reminder of how close the ties between the two countries remained long after independence.

Getting there

The library is at Rua Luís de Camões in Centro, Rio de Janeiro. Santos Dumont Airport (SDU), which handles domestic flights, is only about 2 km away; international flights use Rio de Janeiro/Galeão International Airport (GIG).