Urtasun announces an “unprecedented” work to save the National Library

11/14/2024

Updated at 5:36 p.m.

The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, announced this Thursday that his department will allocate 8 million euros to address a comprehensive reform of the National Library of Spain (BNE), which for a year has suffered at least three episodes of serious flooding.

«We are facing a structural problem of the building’s water management that affects more than 100 downspouts that are distributed throughout the Library,” explained the minister, one month after the last floods that forced the house’s workers to move 5,000 copies, protecting them with umbrellas, so that as few as possible would get wet. «The present and future of the Library cannot be put at risk with limited actions. The time for partial solutions and patches must end,” Urtasun said in his appearance before the Culture Commission.

The plan that the ministry intends to execute will be developed in three phases and the objective is to fix “a problem that does not only affect the roofs and that requires comprehensive action throughout the property.” The first consists of “a comprehensive review of the sanitation and water channeling system, both vertical and horizontal, at the headquarters of the National Library.” The Infrastructure Management has already prepared a map to distinguish different areas of intervention in the more than 100 downspouts in which there is evidence of damage. «The budget planned for this comprehensive intervention will be 8 million euros and the works will last approximately two and a half years,” explained Urtasun.

The second phase of the work at the BNE consists of “implementing new prevention measures to protect the bibliographic heritage for the duration of the intervention.” The library is working on emptying the bibliographic heritage located on the second and last floors of the building that contains part of the general deposit. “This represents a logistic effort impressive on the part of the workers of the National Library. We are talking about more than 240,000 volumes “They will be provisionally relocated to the Alcalá de Henares headquarters before the end of this year,” said Urtasun. Finally, to avoid future leaks, a diagnosis will be commissioned to “determine each and every one of the pathologies and needs at various levels, structural, equipment installations” that the BNE presents.

“We are talking about a unprecedented intervention in recent decades. The National Library of Spain is the custodian of our bibliographic heritage. It is a symbol, without a doubt, but it is much more than this. It is the public infrastructure that guarantees the survival of our bibliographic memory and ensures the access of any citizen to it. The present and future of the library cannot be put at risk with limited actions. The time for partial solutions and patches must end,” said the head of Culture.