Qualla: National Library of Argentina

National Library of Argentina: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit (WT-en) Cjfrey at English Wikivoyage, Public domain. In 1955, Argentina made Jorge Luis Borges director of its National Library. Surrounded by nearly a million books, he was, by then, almost entirely blind. He could barely make out the titles on the spines. He called it the splendid irony of God, who, he wrote, granted him books and blindness at one touch. It was not even the first time the institution had been led by a blind man, and it would not, by then, have surprised anyone who knew its strange and tangled history. The library that holds the soul of Argentine letters has always seemed to attract such fates.

Image: (WT-en) Cjfrey at English Wikivoyage | Public domain

National Library of Argentina: A Library for a Revolution

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kevin Gabbert - User: (WT-shared) Kevin James at wts wikivoyage, Public domain. The library was born in September 1810, in the same revolutionary heat that created the country, founded by decree only months after the May Revolution overthrew Spanish rule in Buenos Aires. Its first director was Mariano Moreno, a fierce young intellectual of that revolution an...

Image: Kevin Gabbert - User: (WT-shared) Kevin James at wts wikivoyage | Public domain

National Library of Argentina: The Blind Directors

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ignacio Sanz, CC BY-SA 2.0. The library has a habit of being run by men losing their sight. Paul Groussac, the formidable French-born scholar who directed it for some forty years, built a rigorous cataloging system and founded its most prestigious journals, then went blind himself before dying in 1929. Deca...

Image: Ignacio Sanz | CC BY-SA 2.0

National Library of Argentina: Houses for the Words

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Santiago Velasquez Lasso, CC BY-SA 4.0. The collection has lived in several homes, each with its own quirk. It began in an old eighteenth-century Jesuit mansion on the Manzana de las Luces, the colonial Block of Enlightenment, at the corner of Moreno and Perú streets. Its founding shelves were stocked with books seized...

Image: Santiago Velasquez Lasso | CC BY-SA 4.0

National Library of Argentina: Concrete and Memory

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dan DeLuca, CC BY 2.0. The library's present home is a startling thing: a vast brutalist structure raised on massive concrete legs, designed in 1961 by Clorindo Testa with Francisco Bullrich and Alicia Cazzaniga. It stands on charged ground. This was the site of the Unzué Palace, the residence where Ju...

Image: Dan DeLuca | CC BY 2.0