Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading

Out here on Rua Luís de Camões, in the heart of downtown Rio, the street name tells you exactly who this institution chose as its patron saint. But when the founders first gathered, there was no grand address, and no certainty they would survive.

In May 1837, forty-three Portuguese emigrants slipped into a room on Rua Direita. Many were political refugees who had fled civil war and absolutist crackdowns back in Portugal. They found themselves thousands of miles from home, in a newly independent Brazil, trying to build lives as merchants and clerks. What they decided they needed most was not a political club, but books: a library where they could share Portuguese literature, educate themselves, and hold onto their common culture.

For decades, the Gabinete Português de Leitura moved through rented quarters. Then came June 1880, the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Portugal's national poet, Luís de Camões. By that point, the institution had grown influential enough that Brazil's Emperor, Dom Pedro II, turned out to lay the cornerstone for a permanent headquarters. In a gesture of imperial goodwill, he officially wiped out the street's old name, Rua da Lampadosa, and renamed it for Camões.

The French sculptor Auguste-Marie Taunay cast the bronze bust of Camões that watches over the approach. Camões lost an eye fighting in Morocco and survived a shipwreck clutching his epic manuscript. For forty-three refugees who had also crossed the Atlantic with almost nothing, there could hardly have been a more fitting guardian.