A video to which EL PAÍS has had access shows the floor of the 12th floor, in the building’s general storage room, flooded and with water falling through several leaks. A hundred books from the eighties of the last century have been affected
Rain floods the National Library
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The National Library of Spain (BNE) suffered the effects of the torrential rains that fell in Madrid on Wednesday, as shown in the video included in this information, to which EL PAÍS has had access and which two people close to the institution have confirmed as “authentic.” ”. The images, which are from this Wednesday, show the flooded floor on the twelfth and last floor of the building that has been leaking for six months. The affected area is the general warehouse, and on that floor are “the books of the modern collection, those from the eighties of the last century,” declared the director of the BNE, Óscar Arroyo Ortega, by telephone. Arroyo, who was in Vitoria, at the Plenary Session of the Sectoral Culture Conference, added that “a little more than a hundred books have been wet, which are being dried and will be returned to that place as soon as possible.” According to his calculations, “water fell for approximately an hour, until the problem was detected.”
The explanation for what happened lies “in the work on the roof due to leaks, which we have been doing for approximately six months.” Arroyo explained that, on Wednesday, during some work, the operators of the company in charge opened a downspout and water began to enter. “Subsequently, the downspout was blocked and there have been no further problems even though it has rained. Of course, we are going to ask the company responsible for what happened for explanations,” he stressed.
National library employees move books and furniture after a warehouse floods
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However, there may be a problem that water leaks reach lower floors, where high-value volumes are located. One of the two sources consulted confirms to this newspaper that the water has already leaked to the lower floor, the 11th. On the eighth and seventh floors, for example, is the old collection of the BNE, with valuable specimens from the 17th century.
For more details, the BNE had initially referred to the Ministry of Culture because the National Library, one of the most important cultural institutions in Spain, has been without a communication coordinator for months and some issues related to the media are referred directly to the Department. of the Ministry headed by Ernest Urtasun. From Culture they limited themselves to confirming that there had been “problems on that last floor because it is under construction.”
The BNE headquarters, located next to Plaza de Colón, in Madrid, is a neoclassical style palace from the last third of the 19th century and its architect was Francisco Jareño. The Palace of Library and Museums, as the building is called, contains, in addition to its bibliographic collections and those of prints and engravings, among which are works by the greatest artists in the history of art, a set of paintings , bronzes, busts, furniture, tapestries and other objects of great historical and artistic value.
According to the institution itself, the number of documents it houses is around 34,000,000, including books, pamphlets, loose sheets, magazines, diaries, old prints, incunabula, manuscripts, drawings, engravings, photographs, posters, maps and plans, postcards, sheet music, sound and audiovisual records, electronic publications…
The BNE, founded in 1712 as the Royal Library by Philip V, has a second headquarters in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid), the Document Access Center, which serves solely as a depository due to the saturation of books in the main building. It must be taken into account that a large number of published works enter the National Library of Spain every day, only by virtue of the legal deposit laws, to which must be added those that enter through acquisition and donations.
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About the signature
Journalist in the Culture section, he specializes in information on photography, history and the Spanish language. Previously he worked on the SER network, Efe and the CSIC press office. He has a degree in Journalism from the Complutense University of Madrid and a master’s degree in Journalism from EL PAÍS, where he was a professor between 2007 and 2014.
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