If you are touring the heart of Bogota, in La Candelaria locality, you can't miss this place where several generations of Colombian readers, researchers, and intellectuals have been educated. The Luis Angel Arango Library, the most extensive public library in the country, with a collection of 2 million copies, is also an important cultural center with an art exhibition hall and concert hall, which received the National Architecture Award in 1966 and was declared an Asset of National Cultural Interest in 2010.
This important educational and cultural center, inaugurated on February 20, 1958, occupies an area of 45,000 square meters and is divided into two blocks. In the north block, you can find more than 2,000 reading stations and 11 specialized rooms (Basic Collections, Map Library, Researchers, Newspaper Library, Science and Technology, Economics, Arts and Humanities, Legal Sciences, Languages, Audiovisuals, and Music).
In the southern block you will be able to contemplate an important sample of Colombian and universal art. There you will find La Casa de La Moneda, with 11,000 pieces of Colombia's numismatic history; the Botero Museum, with 87 works by Picasso, Miró, Monet, among other icons of global art, 123 pieces by the master Fernando Botero; and the Banco de la República Art Museum, where you can appreciate the best of modern and emerging Colombian art. More than 5,000 people visit the Luis Ángel Arango Library every day to enjoy books and all its cultural offerings: conferences, workshops, concerts, among other activities.
This documentary temple also has a northern branch, located on Calle 80 and Carrera VIII. There you can find the bibliographic collection of Colombian politician Alfonso Palacio Rudas and an exhibition of paintings by Ricardo Gómez Campuzano, one of the great figures of Colombian art of the twentieth century.
If you want to see a truly unique part of the library, something you won't find anywhere else, we recommend you dive into the Rare Books and Manuscripts Room. 46,000 unclassifiable bibliographic jewels for their rarity!
You can't miss one collection on your tour: the Incunabula, a set of 35 books produced at the dawn of printing (between 1470 and 1499) that were written by preachers, jurists, politicians, poets and humanists. These volumes came from Europe and were almost all written in Latin.
