There are many who compare the future Public Library of Barcelona – the great facility that the State has yet to build in the city – with the Sagrada Família, due to the delay in its materialization, since its history goes back almost 30 years. However, it seems that the long-awaited super library, a three-section building with different heights that will rise parallel to the França station, is about to become a reality, since it already has a start date for construction: within one year.
This is what La Vanguardia has learned upon learning that the first deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, has submitted for approval the license requested to begin the construction of what is popularly called the mother of all libraries, as it is one of the largest in Spain. , since it will have a useful area of ??16,000 square meters, triple the average size of existing state libraries, and a capacity to house 600,000 volumes and serve 1.6 million users.
The City Council estimates that the infrastructure will be completed in three years from the start of the works. That is, between 2027 and 2028, as long as no incidents arise, as occurred with the initial project, located in the old Born market. In 2001, archaeological remains from before the siege of 1714 were found, which transformed the place into the current Center of Culture and Memory. Circumstances then forced us to rethink this macro-equipment and look for a new location, the current one, but many years have passed until the project has managed to completely leave the offices, where it was stranded for decades.
The disagreements of these years between the administrations did not help much either, as they caused the long-awaited (and desired) equipment to falter on several occasions, but, finally, the City Council, which laid the land, and the Generalitat, which will be in charge of management, agreed put aside their differences so as not to interfere with the start of the works.
Barcelona is one of the few Spanish provinces without a State library, along with Navarra, Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia, which are governed by the regional regime and do not request one. This does not exempt the province of Barcelona from having an excellent network of public libraries, made up of 228 centers and 12 library buses, including the Biblioteca de Catalunya.
These data could make more than one wonder if it is really necessary to build another one. The general director of the Book, María José Gálvez, made it clear when the matter was put on the table and reminded this newspaper that “it is a legal obligation” and that, beyond that, “Barcelona, ??a UNESCO literary city and With its enormous capacity for editorial production, it has the moral obligation to have a large state-owned library that is a reference for modernity and that does not collide with other networks, on the contrary.”
Librarian Carme Fenoll, director of the culture and community area of ??the Pompeu Fabra University and responsible for the Generalitat libraries between 2012 and 2017, regrets that the possibility of having a macro center of this caliber “does not have the media space that deserves”, and in part believes that it is due to the fact that “we do not have references of large libraries in our environment and we are satisfied with the ones we already have because they meet expectations. But I think that Barcelona cannot give up having the best library it could have. With the recognition of the Gabriel García Márquez as a reference space in the world of library architecture, we already have a good example, and this should be a new impulse.”
