What a visitor can actually do
Older accounts invite the reader to stop in for an hour and walk along the halls. That is not how the building works, and the real arrangement is better than the vague version.
- There is a permanent exhibition, and it is new. The old Museum of the BNE was replaced by a display called El Infierno y las Maravillas — Hell and Wonders — which opened on 27 February 2024 on the lower floor. Four rooms on the history of alphabets, images, writing and the book, through to the technologies that write now. Any account naming the Museo de la BNE is naming something that no longer exists under that name.
- There are free temporary exhibitions drawn from the collections, which is where the genuinely remarkable material surfaces — manuscripts, prints, drawings, early printing.
- There is a free guided tour of the building itself, about an hour, taking in the outdoor staircase, the entrance hall, the main stair, the Board Room and the Italian Lounge. It must be booked, places are limited, and each month's slots are released in advance. It does not include the main reading room.
- A reader's card is needed only to consult the collections — the manuscripts, incunabula, maps, photographs, scores and recordings. That is for researchers, and it is the only part of the building a casual visitor cannot reach.
Everything above is free. The reading rooms keep weekday hours; the exhibitions open through the week and on Sunday mornings.
How the collection was built, which is more interesting than theft
Older accounts say the books were "in some cases bought, in others simply seized in typical aristocratic fashion". Two real mechanisms did the work, and both are more consequential than the jibe.
- Legal deposit, from 1716. Every printer in Spain was required to deposit a copy of everything printed. That obligation, carried forward for three centuries, is why the library's Spanish holdings are not a selection but something close to the whole record.
- The confiscations of the 1830s. When the monasteries were dissolved, their libraries — accumulated over centuries and in many cases catalogued by nobody — came to the state, and a great part of the medieval and early modern material arrived this way.
The holdings run to many millions of items rather than the five million books older accounts give, and they are not limited to books: the library is also the national collection of prints and drawings, photographs, maps, sound recordings and music.
One straightforward correction: the BNE does not have branches all over the country. It operates on two sites — this building and a storage and conservation centre at Alcalá de Henares.
The front of the building
Worth a few minutes before going in, because the facade is a programme rather than decoration. Flanking the main staircase are Alfonso X the Wise, the thirteenth-century king who had scientific and legal works translated and compiled in Castilian, and San Isidoro of Seville, whose seventh-century Etymologies was the encyclopaedia of the early Middle Ages. Around the building are Spanish writers and scholars, Cervantes and Fray Luis de León among them. The figures on the stairs are the two patrons a national library would choose: the king who commissioned knowledge and the bishop who organised it.
The museum in the same building
This is the omission worth repairing. The building is the Palacio de Biblioteca y Museos Nacionales, and the library has the Recoletos front while the Museo Arqueológico Nacional has the other side, entered from Calle de Serrano. It is one of Madrid's first-rank museums and no older account of this cluster mentions it at all.
It closed for a long refurbishment in 2008 and reopened in April 2014, so accounts from either side of that are describing different museums. What a visitor comes for:
- The Lady of Elche — the Iberian stone bust with the great wheel-shaped headdresses, and the most recognisable object in Spanish archaeology.
- The Lady of Baza, the seated Iberian figure, found with a cremation burial.
- The Treasure of Guarrazar, the Visigothic hoard of votive crowns, including Recceswinth's hanging with its pendant letters.
- The Bicha of Balazote, the Iberian man-headed bull.
- A full-scale replica of the Altamira cave in the forecourt, made from a mould of the original. Since the cave itself is effectively closed, this is as near as anyone now gets to those paintings.
The two institutions keep separate entrances and separate hours, and it is entirely possible to visit one without ever realising the other is through the wall.
General practicalities for the city are on the Madrid page.