Monday is the biggest day at Real Gabinete Português de Leitura [Cabinet royal portugais de lecture], sanctuary of Portuguese culture in Brazil. On this Monday, July 25, visitors keep flocking to this library in Rio de Janeiro, one of the most beautiful in the world. The other cultural institutions in the city are closed for weekly holidays.
The natural light that enters through the skylight casts a dim light on the reading room and the multicolored leather bindings of the some 400,000 books kept there. For decades, this spectacular library, which houses the largest collection of Portuguese authors outside Portugal, has welcomed scholars who have come to study there. But lately it has become a meeting place for selfie lovers who swarm in the superb main hall.
A piece of Portugal
The Royal Cabinet was one of Rio’s most overlooked cultural nuggets until Instagram and Tik Tok breathed new life into it. As Orlando Inácio, seasoned director of the institution, explains, “it is the effect of social networks. People come, photograph themselves, post their selfies, others see them and want to come too”. A phenomenon that began to appear during the glorious years of the Olympic Games and the World Cup [en 2016 et 2014], and which has grown in recent times. In 2014, Real Gabinete was named the fourth most beautiful library in the world by the magazine [américain] Time.
The sudden arrival of this new public is sometimes resented by traditional users: specialists in Portuguese history, literature or culture. A handful of researchers, entrenched behind small tables, try to concentrate despite the murmurs of tourists and Cariocas who have come to immortalize the moment on their phones. Anyone can borrow books, but there are few non-specialist readers, according to librarian Sylvia Franca, 41.
The history of this place resembles that of other contemporary institutions. The library [en tant qu’institution] was founded in 1837 by some forty Portuguese emigrants, in a Brazil that had only won its independence fifteen years earlier. “It was created to improve the culture of the Portuguese community, since most of those who came to Brazil had no education, explains from the headquarters Francisco Gomes da Costa, the president of the library, born in Portugal. Ces migrants ar