Library of Catalonia
Catalonia's national library shelves its collection inside a 15th-century Gothic hospital.
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The old Hospital de la Santa Creu became Catalonia's national library, so you read inside the restored medieval building itself, not just admire it from the street. Holdings run to nearly four million items.
What to look for
- The restored Gothic elements of the former hospital — its medieval bones were renovated in 1998.
- The general reading room's scale: 2,700 m² with 229 reading seats.
- Under your feet: four underground storage levels, added in the 1990s, holding over 40 km of shelving.
Entrance at Carrer de l'Hospital 56; a working national library, open to the public since 1914.
Library of Catalonia is one of 39 sights worth the detour in Barcelona, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Barcelona pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Barcelona
- Sagrada FamíliaGaudí is buried beneath a church begun in 1882 and still unfinished — one that in 2025 became the world's tallest.
- Camp NouThe bowl that once crammed 120,000 people in to watch Barça — European football's biggest room.
- Park GüellGaudí's failed luxury subdivision — 2 of 60 planned homes ever built — that Barcelona inherited as a mosaic playground.
- Casa Milà (La Pedrera)Gaudí's last private house looks like a wind-carved sea cliff parked on a city corner.
- Casa BatllóGaudí reskinned a townhouse into a slain dragon, down to columns shaped like leg bones.
- Barcelona CathedralThirteen white geese live in the cloister — one for each year Saint Eulalia was alive before Rome killed her.