A leap-day charter: Lisbon gets a public library, 29 February 1796

On Monday 29 February 1796, an extra day in a leap year, a royal charter was signed at the palace of Queluz, just north-west of Lisbon. It spoke in the first person of the queen. “Eu a Rainha”, it began: “I the Queen make known to those who see this charter.” The signature at the foot was not hers. It read simply “Principe”.1 source1 source

Queen Maria I had suffered a mental collapse in February 1792, and since then her son João had carried out the royal functions in her name. He took the formal title of prince regent only in 1799. So it was the prince who put his name to the alvará, a royal charter with the force of law, while the text spoke as the queen. Below it the Marquis of Ponte de Lima, the queen's chief steward and minister of the royal Treasury, added his.2 sources2 sources

The document ordered that a public, well-stocked library be set up in Lisbon at once, under the name Real Bibliotheca Pública da Corte, the Royal Public Library of the Court. It was registered at the Treasury secretariat on 5 April and published through the royal chancery on 9 April 1796, and it ordered the original to be kept in the royal archive in the Torre do Tombo.1 source1 source

That library is today's Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal, the country's largest library and the keeper of its printed heritage. It was not built from nothing. Its first shelves came from an institution set up to keep books away from readers: the royal board of censors.3 sources3 sources

Until 1768 every book published in Portugal had to be passed by three authorities: the bishop, the Inquisition and the Desembargo do Paço, the king's high court for matters of grace. A law of 5 April 1768, under King José I's chief minister, the future Marquis of Pombal, merged the three into a single crown body, the Real Mesa Censória, staffed by royal censors.1 source1 source

The board soon had a large library of its own. Pombal had expelled the Jesuits in 1759, and their colleges' libraries, more than 60,000 volumes, were placed in its care. It also ran the Subsídio Literário, a new tax raised to pay for schools, and the first use its president set for the money was buying books for a public library.2 sources2 sources

That president was Frei Manuel do Cenáculo, a Franciscan theologian who became Bishop of Beja in 1770 and led the board until 1777. As a young professor he had travelled to Rome in 1750 and visited the great libraries of Italy, France and Spain. Under him the board set out to found a public library to rank with the best in Europe, open to “the curious and the learned”, which would also serve the censors at their work.2 sources2 sources

The plan stalled when José I died in February 1777 and Pombal fell. Cenáculo withdrew to his diocese in Beja. On 21 June 1787 Maria I replaced the board with a new one, the Real Mesa da Comissão Geral sobre o Exame e Censura dos Livros, which gave the Church back a say in censorship. Its rulings drew sharp criticism, and a law of 17 December 1794 abolished it as “useless and ineffective” and restored the old threefold system.2 sources2 sources

That left the censors' library without an owner. The government asked António Ribeiro dos Santos, a former librarian of the University of Coimbra, to report on it. His report of 5 January 1796 painted a grim picture of neglect, but counted more than 50,000 volumes, among them, he wrote, excellent and costly books and valuable collections that made “a great fund” for a royal library at court. Cleaning, sorting and cataloguing began at once.1 source1 source

The alvará has nine short articles. The second makes the books of the abolished board “the first fund” of the new library and assigns it part of the Subsídio Literário for its growth and running costs. The third places it directly under the Crown, answerable only to the Treasury secretariat, and declares it part of the Crown's public property, never to be broken up “by any title or pretext”. The fifth says that until a building of its own was put up, it was to stay in the rooms the board had used.1 source1 source

The fourth article made the minister of the Treasury, who was then Ponte de Lima, Inspector General of the library. The sixth listed the staff, from the chief librarian down to a doorkeeper. Six bibliographers were to hand out books, manuscripts and other objects to members of the public who wished “to see and consult” them.1 source1 source

Ribeiro dos Santos became the first chief librarian. The library's own account gives his term as 1796 to 1816; the Dicionário de Historiadores Portugueses biography dates his title of chief librarian to 1804. Born in Porto in 1745, he spent his teens in Rio de Janeiro, studied canon law at Coimbra and became the university's librarian in 1777. He was also a royal censor, a historian of the sacred literature of Portugal's Jews, and an Arcadian poet who wrote as Elpino Duriense.3 sources3 sources

The library opened to the public on 13 May 1797, Prince João's birthday. It occupied 16 rooms in the Torreão Ocidental, the western corner pavilion of Terreiro do Paço, the great square on the Tagus waterfront. The books were arranged in twelve sections by subject, with numbered rooms for history, belles-lettres, the natural sciences, law and politics, theology, general works, and manuscripts and antiquities.4 sources4 sources

Months before the opening, Ribeiro dos Santos wrote to Cenáculo in Beja to tell him the news, calling him the library's “first benefactor and director”. The bishop answered by giving it a large part of his own collection, rare printed books and manuscripts, and a cabinet of more than 3,000 coins and medals. The books travelled to Lisbon between December 1796 and January 1798. Ribeiro dos Santos catalogued them himself and called the gift the Casa dos Livros de Beja.2 sources2 sources

Cenáculo's formal deed of gift to the prince, dated Beja, 24 March 1797, praised a ruler whose aim, he wrote, was to repeat at his court the Museum of Alexandria. It also asked a favour: the salary arrears he said he was owed for his years as president of the censorship board. According to Manuela Domingos, who organised the library's 2006 exhibition on the gift, the promised rewards came late and reached only his relatives.2 sources2 sources

The new library drew distinguished visitors. The library's historians single out a visit on 16 October 1797 by the Marquise of Alorna, a poet and one of the best-known women of letters of her day, as a sign of the public recognition the new institution won. Under Ribeiro dos Santos's successors, up to the end of the civil war in 1834, it kept growing and lengthened its opening hours despite real difficulties.1 source1 source

Other early stock came from the library of the defunct Royal Academy of History and from Ribeiro dos Santos's own books. Then came legal deposit, the rule that printers send the library copies of what they print. The library's own history dates the first legal deposit law to 1805 and says it extended to printing houses the duty to deposit one copy of everything they printed.2 sources2 sources

The date is not settled. The library's 2006 exhibition and the European national librarians' conference also give 1805. The Dicionário de Historiadores Portugueses entry on the library dates legal deposit to 8 June 1796, and a Brazilian study cites an alvará of 12 October 1805 that required a copy of every edition published in Portugal to be offered to the library of the court.4 sources4 sources

The first decades were hard. The Dicionário entry says the library never became the great public library Ribeiro dos Santos hoped for in his twenty years in charge. It competed with a second royal library at Ajuda and with the national archive, and was asked to give up books to rebuild Ajuda's. When the court fled to Brazil in 1807, much of the government's attention went with it.1 source1 source

The library's second life began with a change in ownership. After the liberals won the civil war in 1834, Portugal's religious orders were abolished and their property nationalised. On 16 October 1834 a depot for the books, archives and paintings of the closed convents was set up in the Franciscan convent of São Francisco, on the hill of the Chiado. Its holdings ran to more than 300,000 books and over 6,000 paintings.3 sources3 sources

A decree of 7 December 1836 renamed the institution the Biblioteca Nacional de Lisboa, and from that year it shared the convent with the depot and the Academy of Fine Arts. On 12 November 1841 the depot was formally merged into the library. Time Out Lisboa dates the library's move to the convent to 1841, the year of the merger. The library's own history, which counts more than 130 years in the Chiado, fits the earlier date.4 sources4 sources

Sorting the convent books took decades. According to the Dicionário, the depot received 183,000 works in 1841; by 1865, after some 19,000 works in Spanish and especially Latin had been sold off in lots and by weight, 13,000 were left. The library's own printed stock doubled between 1843 and 1857, to 147,000 volumes. Of the convent paintings, the Academy of Fine Arts picked the best for a planned national gallery of painting.2 sources2 sources

Who the library was for remained an argument. Laws of 1863 and 1884 counted “public reading” among its functions, and it kept evening opening hours. In the early 1900s the director Xavier da Cunha wanted it reserved for scholars; the first republican director, Faustino da Fonseca, threw it open again, and reader numbers almost doubled between 1910 and 1911. A decree of 27 June 1931 defined it as the national, central repository of Portuguese books.1 source1 source

Under the First Republic the library was run by writers and historians. Jaime Cortesão, a doctor decorated for his service in the First World War, became director, with the essayist Raul Proença pushing a technical reform of the catalogues; their circle was known as the Grupo da Biblioteca. Both were dismissed after taking part in the failed revolt of February 1927 against the military dictatorship, and Cortesão went into exile. After a brief return by the historian Fidelino de Figueiredo, the military historian Lieutenant-Colonel Augusto Botelho da Costa Veiga ran it from 1928 to 1950, under the dictatorship.1 source1 source

By the middle of the twentieth century the convent was full and falling apart. Time Out Lisboa describes rain coming through the roof of the reading room and staff catching it in jugs and basins. A commission appointed in 1951 chose a new building over repairs. The architect Porfírio Pardal Monteiro began the studies in 1953; after his death in 1957 his nephew António Pardal Monteiro carried the project through. Building work began in 1958.3 sources3 sources

The new Biblioteca Nacional on Campo Grande was inaugurated on 10 April 1969 by the President of the Republic, Admiral Américo Tomás, and blessed by Cardinal Cerejeira. It had a ten-storey book tower with room for more than a million books and a general reading room for 250 readers. Daciano da Costa designed the furniture and lighting, Guilherme Camarinha the great woven hanging in the reading room, and Leopoldo de Almeida the reliefs on the façade.3 sources3 sources

The library's mission, as its current statutes put it, is to collect, process and preserve Portugal's documentary heritage, in Portuguese and about Portugal, in every format, and to make it available. It says it still pursues, in essence, the aims for which it was created in 1796. It is also the national bibliographic agency: it issues legal deposit numbers and ISSNs, compiles the national bibliography and runs PORBASE, the national union catalogue.1 source1 source

Legal deposit is the clearest thread back to the early years. Under Decree-Law 74/82 of 3 March 1982, printers must deposit 11 copies of most publications printed in Portugal (one copy for small print runs, theses and maps), and the library passes most of them on to other libraries. In 2025 it unpacked and checked 362,431 items, kept 75,313 for its own collections, including 2,450 theses, and sent 287,118 to the other beneficiary libraries.2 sources2 sources

The reading rooms on Campo Grande counted 25,949 readers in 2025, down from 31,995 in 2024; the activity report puts the fall mainly down to microfilm users moving to digitised copies. Anyone over 18 with a reader's card can use the collections. The library also runs the Biblioteca Pública de Évora, the library Cenáculo founded in 1805 after he became Archbishop of Évora, so the library he helped to stock and the one he founded now belong to the same institution. In 2026, a year without a 29 February, it marked its 230th anniversary on 27 February.5 sources5 sources