Arús Library

The Biblioteca Pública Arús was set up in 1895 as a library to educate working people and is now a research centre specialising in contemporary social movements, with an important collection of books on the workers’ movement, anarchism and freemasonry.

When it opened, the library’s collection consisted of some 24,000 volumes that encompassed all the fields of knowledge of the day, including philosophy, religion, social sciences, law, languages, biology, botany, medicine, art, music, literature, geography and history. This highly prized collection survives almost intact today and bears witness to the age when the library was founded.

The Biblioteca Arús currently houses some 80,000 volumes of books and booklets, serial publications, manuscripts and incunabula, cartographic documents, music scores, microforms and electronic resources.

The guided tour of the Biblioteca Pública Arús will tell you about the history of this unique library and its connections with the history of the social movements prevalent in Barcelona during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

What does your Biblioteca Arús booking include?:

Biblioteca Pública Arús.