There is a certain kind of traveller who plans a trip around a painting — who will fly to Madrid for a morning with Velázquez, or reroute a road trip to spend an hour in front of a Vermeer. I would like to make the case for doing the same with libraries.
Not hotels with bookshelves. Not “library-inspired” café interiors. The real thing: public institutions and monastic collections so extraordinary in their architecture, their atmosphere, or the sheer weight of what they contain, that they justify the journey entirely on their own. These are the places that remind you what human civilisation has been trying to do — capture knowledge, preserve it, make it beautiful enough that people might want to keep coming back.
Here, across three continents and twelve centuries of building, are the ones worth travelling for.
The Long Room, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
There is a useful piece of intelligence to carry with you to Dublin: the Long Room at Trinity College is almost certainly more impressive than you’re expecting, even if you’ve already seen hundreds of photographs of it. The photographs flatten something that is fundamentally about scale and depth, the way the barrel-vaulted ceiling seems to press the two rows of dark oak bookshelves together into a kind of tunnel of accumulated learning, receding into the distance for the full sixty-five metres of the room’s length. The collection itself is formidable. The Long Room houses around 200,000 of the library’s oldest books, and the building has been receiving volumes since 1661, when it was granted the right to a copy of every book published in Ireland and Britain. The Brian Boru Harp, the oldest surviving Irish harp, and the model for the harp on Irish coinage, lives here too.
Practical notes: Book tickets well in advance, especially in summer, at visittrinity.ie. Tickets from €19. The Long Room is open daily; the Old Library and Long Room remain accessible to visitors until the end of 2027, when a major restoration project begins. Go early – the first slot of the day offers a markedly quieter experience.
Admont Abbey Library, Austria
The monks of Admont, in the mountains of Upper Styria, describe their library as the “eighth wonder of the world.” This is the kind of claim that tends to produce scepticism. Then you walk in. The library hall is the largest monastic library in existence: seventy metres long, fourteen metres wide, thirteen metres high, flooded with light from concealed windows positioned to illuminate the shelves without damaging the books. The ceiling frescoes, painted by Bartolomeo Altomonte between 1774 and 1776, depict the progress of human knowledge from the earthly sciences through divine revelation. The bookcases, fourteen of them, each a double-height wall of gilded, carved wood, hold around 70,000 volumes, with the full abbey collection running to 200,000. There are over 1,400 manuscripts, more than half of them from the Middle Ages. What distinguishes Admont from other great monastic libraries is its relationship to its landscape. The abbey sits in the Enns valley, surrounded by the peaks of the Gesäuse range; the library’s windows frame mountains as well as books. It is, uniquely, a room that feels both sealed from the world and entirely of it.
Practical notes: Admont is around two and a half hours by car from Vienna, or accessible by train to the nearby town of Admont. The library is open from April to November; check stiftadmont.at for current hours and entry prices. Guided tours are available and strongly recommended.
Biblioteca Joanina, Coimbra, Portugal
The Biblioteca Joanina was built to impress. Commissioned by King João V and completed in 1728, it was designed as a monument to royal patronage and to the power of the University of Coimbra, one of the oldest universities in continuous operation in the world. It succeeds, extravagantly, on both counts. The library consists of three interconnected rooms, each decorated in a different colour scheme; green and gold in the first, red and gold in the second, black and gold in the third, linked by carved and gilded arches that create an effect of increasing depth and ceremony as you move through the space. The lacquered bookcases are made from native Portuguese oak; the painted ceilings depict allegories of science and wisdom; the gilded woodwork is so dense and so intricate that the eye doesn’t quite know where to rest. There is also this: the library houses a colony of bats. At night, the bats emerge from their roosts behind the bookcases and eat the insects that might otherwise damage the books. They are not a curiosity or an eccentricity. They are part of the library’s working ecology, an arrangement that has existed for centuries and that the custodians guard as carefully as the manuscripts themselves.
Practical notes: Entry is through the University of Coimbra’s combined ticket system (€16.50), which also includes the university’s historic buildings, museums, and the Academic Prison. Timed-entry slots fill quickly in summer. The university’s hilltop setting is spectacular; allow a full day for the complex.
Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
There is a particular pleasure in discovering a great library in an unexpected city, finding something so contrary to the chaos and heat of Rio de Janeiro’s downtown streets that it genuinely stops you. The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura, the Royal Portuguese Reading Room, sits on the Rua Luís de Camões in the Centro district and is, by any measure, one of the most beautiful rooms in the Americas. It was founded in 1837 by Portuguese immigrants who wanted to preserve a connection to the literature and culture of their home country. The building that houses the collection, completed in 1887, in the Neo-Manueline style that echoes Portugal’s great Gothic-Renaissance monasteries, was designed by the Portuguese architect Rafael da Silva e Castro, and is a deliberate act of cultural memory: its intricate stone façade, wooden balconies, and stained-glass ceiling dome reconstruct something of Lisbon inside a Brazilian city. The collection runs to more than 350,000 volumes, making it the largest and most significant collection of Portuguese-language works outside Portugal itself. The reading room, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves rising to an ornate iron chandelier and a ceiling of coloured glass, is open to anyone who wishes to read. It is, remarkably, free to enter.
Practical notes: The library is open Monday to Friday, 10am to 5pm. Entry is free. Located in the Centro district; best reached by Uber or metro (Uruguaiana station). The surrounding streets are busy; go in the morning.
The Long Room, George Peabody Library, Baltimore, USA
The George Peabody Library in Baltimore is not famous in the way that the great European libraries are famous. It does not have the Book of Kells or a UNESCO designation. It has, instead, one of the most quietly astonishing interiors in any library anywhere: a five-storey atrium of cast-iron balconies, rising from a black-and-white marble floor to a glass ceiling that floods the room with the kind of natural light that makes books glow. The library was built between 1858 and 1878, funded by the philanthropist George Peabody and designed by the architect Edmund George Lind. Its 300,000 volumes are arranged around the balconies of the atrium in a system that makes the books themselves part of the architecture, the spines visible from below, the whole collection a kind of vertical garden of knowledge. It is now managed by Johns Hopkins University and is available to readers as a research library. It is also, increasingly, used as a venue for events, which has created the slightly surreal experience of encountering it dressed for a wedding or a lecture when you arrived hoping for silence. There is something very Wes Anderson about it.
Practical notes: Located at 17 East Mount Vernon Place, Baltimore. Open Tuesday to Friday, 9am to 4pm; closed at weekends except for events. Free to enter. A short walk from the Walters Art Museum, which is also worth a morning.
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
The State Library of Victoria, opened in 1856 as the Melbourne Public Library and claiming to be one of the world’s first free public libraries, has at its heart a reading room that manages to be both spectacular and genuinely, actively used. The La Trobe Reading Room, completed in 1913, is an octagonal dome of reinforced concrete and glass rising to a height of 34.5 metres, with six tiers of galleries around the central space and room for 320 readers at the tables below.
What distinguishes the La Trobe Reading Room from other great library interiors is that it is not a museum piece. On any given afternoon, it contains students, researchers, visitors from interstate, people using the Wi-Fi, and retirees reading newspapers. The building has welcomed more than two and a half million visitors in recent years, making it one of the busiest libraries in the world by footfall. The reading room’s genius is that it accommodates all of them without feeling crowded, because its scale is genuinely extraordinary and its light genuinely good.
Practical notes: 328 Swanston Street, Melbourne. Open seven days a week; free entry to the reading rooms. slv.vic.gov.au for current hours and exhibitions.
