Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading

The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading began as a way for exiles to keep their culture close. Forty-three Portuguese immigrants, political refugees, founded it in 1837 in Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Empire of Brazil. It was the first association their community formed in the city. Today its library holds the largest collection of Portuguese works outside Portugal, about 350,000 volumes, and still receives some six thousand titles from Portugal every year.

The building looks back to the age of the Portuguese voyages. The Portuguese architect Rafael da Silva e Castro designed it in the Neo-Manueline style, a revival of the ornate manner named after King Manuel I (1495–1521), whose reign coincided with the great discoveries. Emperor Pedro II laid the cornerstone on 10 June 1880, and Princess Isabel opened the building in 1887. The façade, modelled on the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, was worked in Lisbon stone by Germano José Salle and shipped to Rio. Its four statues show Cabral, Camões, Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama.

Inside, wooden bookcases rise in tiers around the reading room, under an iron-framed skylight that was the first of its kind in Brazil. Among the rarities are a copy of the first edition of Camões’s Os Lusíadas, from 1572, and a manuscript of a comedy by Machado de Assis.

Machado de Assis mattered here in another way. The Brazilian Academy of Letters held its first five formal sessions in this building, with him presiding. The library has been open to the public since 1900 and sees about 150 visitors a day. It is one of the rooms in our tour of beautiful libraries around the world.