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PERALADA CASTLE

Mateu’s passion

With its sea­soned wooden book­shelves that line the long walls from ceil­ing to floor, with the spines of tens of thou­sands of vin­tage books and man­u­scripts in mul­ti­ple rows and with its sub­tle, low-level light­ing, the feel­ing that the vis­i­tor gets when en­ter­ing the Per­al­ada Cas­tle Li­brary is above all one of warmth.

The li­brary also ex­udes the weight of his­tory that goes back to be­fore the mid 19th cen­tury when the Ro­cabertí fam­ily took on the chal­lenge of restor­ing the old Carmel con­vent, which had pre­vi­ously been aban­doned dur­ing the years of the Span­ish con­fis­ca­tion. Thus the ori­gins of today’s li­brary were laid and it ini­tially stocked the fam­ily’s pri­vate book col­lec­tion.

Yet the per­son who can take most credit for turn­ing the li­brary into what it is today was Miquel Mateu, a pas­sion­ate col­lec­tor who ded­i­cated him­self body and soul to col­lect­ing his­tory books, lit­er­a­ture, early pam­phlets and man­u­scripts, and also a rich bib­li­og­ra­phy of books about the local areas of Girona and Em­pordà.

Nev­er­the­less, the book col­lec­tion that has be­come the jewel in the crown of the cas­tle’s li­brary is the Cer­vantes archive, which boasts more than 5,000 vol­umes, and in­cludes both works writ­ten by Cer­vantes him­self and books about the great Span­ish writer. It is a unique col­lec­tion that pro­vides a gen­uine trea­sure trove for Cer­vantes schol­ars.

The li­brary also con­tains rare and cu­ri­ous tomes from the 16th and 17th cen­turies, such as the one cho­sen by Inés Padrosa, the Per­al­ada Cas­tle li­brar­ian, who has ded­i­cated 40 years in the ser­vice of this tem­ple of books in the heart of the Em­pordà re­gion.

Fea­ture Cul­ture and her­itage

His­tory of the Suc­ces­sors of Alexan­der the Great

Year: 1570

Printer: Ap­presso Francesco Ziletti, Venice

From Venice to Peralada

“From Venice to Naples. From Naples to Poblet. From Poblet to uncertainty. From uncertainty to Peralada.”

This is how Inés Padrosa, the archivist and librarian in charge of the Peralada Castle Library, summarises the various journeys made by the book she selected, acquired by the Rocabertí brothers, the counts of Peralada, which has been part of the library since the 19th century.

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