Livraria Lello (Lello Bookstore)

Livraria Lello’s staircase, skylight and façade

Everything in the old shop turns around the staircase in the middle, between the ground floor and the gallery. Look at the stairs first, then the skylight above them, and save the front for your way out.

The staircase

The staircase looks like carved wood, but it’s one of the first in Portugal made of concrete, dressed in painted plaster. At its base is the signature of the engineer behind the building, Francisco Xavier Esteves.

Its colour was an accident. In the first big restoration, in 1993, the brown staircase was painted red by mistake; the sculptor José Rodrigues liked it, and red it stayed.

The skylight, the busts and the rails

Above the stairs, the skylight by the Dutch artist Samuel Van Krieken shows a blacksmith and the motto “Decus in Labore”, dignity in work. Since the 2018 restoration it has a smiley too, by a tradition that each round of works leaves a detail of its time.

Around the shelves stand six busts of Portuguese writers, with Eça de Queirós, the great 19th-century novelist, among them. At their feet run the rails that brought books up from the basement from 1906 to the early 1990s; the cart on them is a replica.

The façade on Rua das Carmelitas

Outside, cross the street before you leave and look back. The front is neo-Gothic, and the two figures painted either side of the windows, by Joseph Bielmann, stand for Art and Science.

Siza’s new wing and the Gema Room at Livraria Lello

Since 24 June 2026 the visit goes on into a new wing by Álvaro Siza, the Porto architect who won the Pritzker Prize. It adds about 1,000 m² of rooms and an auditorium.

You go in past “Hephaestus & Aphrodite”, a monumental drawing by Siza, carried out by the artist Ana Aragão. Beyond it is the Manifesto Library, a hundred books chosen with Service95, the book club of the pop singer Dua Lipa, and it’s part of every visit.

The same wing holds A4, an installation by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei made of more than 200,000 blank sheets of paper. It takes a ticket of its own.

Back in the old building, the Gema Room in the basement keeps rare books and the personal library of Amy Winehouse, the English singer, more than 200 volumes. It opens for visits at 12:00 and 16:00 every day, also on a separate ticket.

Livraria Lello and Harry Potter

For years Lello was billed as the bookshop that inspired Hogwarts. J.K. Rowling, who taught English in Porto in the early 1990s, put an end to that on Twitter on 21 May 2020.

Her tweet was blunt: she’d never been inside, had never even heard of it, and it had nothing to do with Hogwarts. Nor were any of the films shot here; they were made in Britain.

She did offer the disappointed a consolation: she had written in the Café Majestic at times, on Rua de Santa Catarina. “This was probably the most beautiful café I ever wrote in, actually,” she added. It’s about ten minutes’ walk from Lello, open Monday to Saturday, 9:00 to 23:00.

Livraria Lello tickets, hours and the best time to go

Even if you only want to buy a book, you need a ticket to go in. It works as a voucher for a book from the shop: the terms name its own imprint, Livraria Lello Editions, and visitors in 2026 found only books with the LL seal count.

Each ticket has a time on it, and the voucher stays valid for 60 minutes after that. You can buy one in the queue, paying by phone rather than in cash, and same-day tickets are sold until half an hour before closing, while they last.

The sure way in is a three-hour walking tour with fast-track entry, at €65 per adult, with a live guide. It starts from the Terreiro da Sé, the square in front of the Cathedral.

Along the way it passes the Cathedral, the Clérigos Tower, São Bento station and the rabelo boats, the old port wine boats on the river. Your Lello ticket arrives on WhatsApp during the walk, and it’s free to cancel up to 23 hours before.

The Porto passes leave Lello out, but its neighbour, the Clérigos Tower, is in the Highlights Pass, with the Cathedral and the Six Bridges cruise.

With the standard voucher there’s no skipping the line. Priority entry is only for those the law covers (people with disabilities or reduced mobility, over-65s, pregnant women, adults with babies) and for the shop’s Cartão Amigo members.

So plan on a wait. Visitors in 2026 stood in line for 15 to 45 minutes to get in, and one in September spent about 40 minutes more at the till to pay for a book. The visit itself is shorter: another was done in 10 to 20 minutes.

The bookshop doesn’t say when it’s quiet, but visitors do. Some lined up 30 to 45 minutes before the 9:00 opening to be in the first group. Others did better late in the day: one bought a ticket in the last hour of a weekday and walked straight in.

None of this guarantees an empty shop. Reviewers complain of crowds even in February, and one in March found it much smaller than in the photos.

Livraria Lello since 1906, and the voucher that saved it

The business goes back to the bookseller Ernesto Chardron, whose bookshop the Lello brothers bought in 1894. For a building of their own they turned to Esteves, the engineer whose name is on the stairs, and it opened on Rua das Carmelitas on 13 January 1906.

Writers and artists came to the opening, among them the poet Guerra Junqueiro and Aurélio Paz dos Reis, who shot the first Portuguese films. The title of “most beautiful bookshop in the world” came a century later: the shop traces it to a 2006 article in El País by the Spanish novelist Enrique Vila-Matas.

By 2015, the shop says, Lello was at risk of closing. On 23 July that year it started charging for entry, with the ticket’s value taken off a book, and within six months its sales went from 190 to 522 books a day.

The building was listed as a Property of Public Interest in 2013. In 2026 the government raised it to National Monument, the highest heritage status in Portugal.

Starting the day at Livraria Lello

Lello is at Rua das Carmelitas 144, in the Baixa, Porto’s old downtown, a six-minute walk from São Bento station. From the door, a morning’s walk heads east across the old centre.