Biblioteca Arus

The visit to the Arús Library allows us to delve into its collection as a reference research center for the social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Founded in 1895 by the will of Rossend Arús, the Library was installed in the house where Arús lived.

The Arús Public Library was inaugurated in 1895 with the intention of being a library for the education of the working class. The Arús Library had some 24,000 volumes when it opened that covered all areas of knowledge of the moment and that remain in the library to this day. This collection includes material as diverse as philosophy, religion, social sciences, law, languages, biology, botany, medicine, art, music, literature, geography and history. As well as other general works such as dictionaries, press, etc. The fact that the library closed to the public in 1939 and didn’t reopen again until 1967 meant that it avoided the purifying Francoist purges and the collection found today remains mostly intact.

Currently, the Public Arús Library is a specialised research centre of history and culture from the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, which has maintained this original collection which is testament to the time in which it was founded, it also has a special collection covering the labour movement, anarchism and freemasonry, which have been completed gradually thanks to donations from entities and individuals. The current collection has 75,323 volumes.