Visiting Buenos Aires is an unforgettable experience. It is a wonderful city, where there are a million things to do and see. Therefore, when you have no choice but to choose, there are a number of essentials that you cannot miss. If you are in Buenos Aires and you want to take the best of the best of the city, you have to visit El Ateneo bookstore, considered one of the most beautiful in the world.
The El Ateneo bookstore is located on Avenida Santa Fe 1860, in the Recoleta neighborhood. To get there, the simplest thing is to take the “subway” to Callao, line D. From there it is less than 5 minutes to the bookstore. In addition, it is open every day, even Sunday, from morning to night.
The El Ateneo bookstore is located in the building that was previously the Grand Splendid Theater. This building was inaugurated in 1919, coinciding with the end of the Great War, as a cinema and theater to host culture and shows at the height of a flourishing city like Buenos Aires at that time. This great Greek-inspired theater, the work of the architects Peró and Torres Armengol, was for years one of the nerve centers of the scene in Buenos Aires.
With the arrival of the new millennium, the Ilhsa group, owners of the El Ateneo bookstore chain, decided to rent this emblematic theater to house another facet of culture: the great literary spectacle.
They invested a fortune in Argentine pesos, but every peso was worth it. Fernando Manzone, the architect who carried out the restoration, knew how to transform the space of armchairs and stalls into cupboards and shelves where thousands of books rest expectantly waiting for the reader to bring them to life.
Today, El Ateneo Bookstore is much more than a book store. It is a wonderful setting that preserves the structure of a great theater and serves as a meeting place between artists and the public, the difference is that here the artists are the books.
It is the place to sit in an armchair and browse some of the more than 120,000 titles that they have sleeping in their cupboards, waiting for the reader eager for adventure to make them reborn. The place to have a coffee on stage, the same one where Gardel once sang, flanked by the huge red velvet curtain, while a piano enlivens our moment and thousands of books are waiting impatiently for you to choose them and make them the protagonists of today’s show .
There is much more, but I cannot tell you about it without spoiling the wonderful feeling of entering the El Ateneo bookstore for the first time, you have to see it to feel it !!
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