Livraria Lello

Overview

Livraria Lello is a bookshop of 1906 on the Rua das Carmelitas with a forked wooden staircase, a stained-glass ceiling and a claim, repeated by Lonely Planet and the Guardian, to be one of the three most beautiful bookshops in the world. With Bertrand in Lisbon it is one of the oldest bookshops in Portugal, and since 2015 it has charged for entry, because the number of people who come to look at it made it impossible to run as a shop.

It is worth seeing once, on a timed ticket redeemable against a book, and it is worth knowing that the interior is small, the crowd is large and the visit is fifteen minutes; the staircase, the Decus in Labore window and the little rail cart that once moved books along the shelves are the things to look for.

History

The firm began in 1869 as the Livraria Internacional of Ernesto Chardron, a Frenchman with a shop on the Rua dos Clérigos. The brothers José and António Lello, booksellers and members of Porto’s intellectual bourgeoisie, bought into the Chardron business in 1894 and had the engineer Francisco Xavier Esteves build them a new shop on the Rua das Carmelitas, opened in 1906 as Lello & Irmão; it took the Lello name outright in 1919.

It was classified as a Property of Public Interest in 1994 and restored for a reopening in 1995. In 2014 the Lionesa group bought a majority stake, in 2015 entry fees began, and in 2016 the facade was restored behind a mural to its original grey. The shop has since bought a set of Bob Dylan’s teenage letters at auction and houses a library of banned books curated with the singer Dua Lipa.

Visiting

Entry is by timed voucher bought online or at the ticket office nearby, redeemable against a book purchase; the shop opens daily from 09:30 to 19:00 and the queue outside is part of the street. The facade is neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau, with the painted figures of Art and Science by José Bielman flanking the upper windows and the name in colour over the arch.

Inside is one room on two levels: shelves to the ceiling, plaster painted to look like carved wood, the forked staircase rising to a gallery with wooden balusters, and above it the 8 m by 3.5 m stained-glass skylight with the owners’ monogram and the motto Decus in Labore, “dignity in work”. The rails and wooden cart used to move books between the shelves are still there. Most of the stock is Portuguese, with a shelf of English translations of Portuguese writers.

Tips

• Book the first slot of the day; by mid-morning the room is shoulder to shoulder and the staircase is a queue.
• The voucher’s value comes off a book, so pick one; the Portuguese classics in translation make the ticket worthwhile.
• Bertrand in Lisbon’s Chiado, trading since 1732, is the older shop and free to enter, if the queue here defeats you.
• The Clérigos tower is two minutes away and a natural pairing.

Nearby

• Clérigos tower: two minutes.
• Café Piolho by the university, a student haunt since the 19th century: three minutes.
• São Bento station: six minutes.
• Bombarda gallery district: six minutes west.