Real Gabinete Português de Leitura

The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, the Royal Portuguese Reading Room, is a library in the centre of Rio de Janeiro and one of the city's most admired interiors. It was founded on 14 May 1837 by 43 Portuguese immigrants and political refugees as the first association of the city's Portuguese community.

The building was designed by the Portuguese architect Rafael da Silva e Castro in the Neo-Manueline style, which revived the ornate architecture of Portugal's Age of Discovery. Emperor Pedro II laid the cornerstone on 10 June 1880, and Princess Isabel and her husband, the Count of Eu, inaugurated the building on 10 September 1887. The façade, inspired by the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, was carved from lioz limestone in Lisbon and shipped across the Atlantic. It carries statues of Pedro Álvares Cabral, Luís de Camões, Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama, with medallions of the writers Fernão Lopes, Gil Vicente, Alexandre Herculano and Almeida Garrett.

Inside, the reading room is lined with wooden bookshelves and Neo-Manueline doorways under a skylight with an iron frame, said to be the first of its kind in Brazil, from which a chandelier hangs. Look out for the Altar da Pátria, a monument about 1.7 metres high in silver, ivory and marble made by the Porto goldsmith António Maria Ribeiro and acquired in 1923, and for paintings by José Malhoa, Carlos Reis and Henrique Medina.

The library holds about 350,000 volumes, the largest collection of Portuguese works outside Portugal, and still receives around 6,000 titles a year from Portugal. Its rare books include a first edition of Camões's Os Lusíadas from 1572, the Ordinances of King Manuel from 1521 and the manuscript of a comedy by Machado de Assis, who presided over the first five formal sessions of the Brazilian Academy of Letters held here.

The library has been open to the public since 1900 and receives around 150 visitors a day. In 2014 Time magazine ranked it fourth among the world's most beautiful libraries, and it has appeared in films such as O Primo Basílio and Os Maias. As a working library that also runs courses and publishes a journal, it asks visitors to be quiet and considerate of readers; check opening times before you go, as they are not published on the pages used for this listing.

The library is in the Centro district along with Confeitaria Colombo and the Theatro Municipal, so it fits easily into a morning in the historic centre.