The rains on Wednesday 16 October caused damage to one of the capital’s most important buildings: the Madrid headquarters of the National Library (BNE), which is responsible for preserving part of Spain’s bibliographic and documentary heritage. In total, more than one hundred books of historical relevance have been seriously affected.
El País sources have provided the newspaper with images of flooding and leaks on the twelfth and top floor, where modern books (from 1980 onwards) are kept. They have also revealed that, for the past six months, work has been underway on the roof of the building, which is a nineteenth-century palace in the neoclassical style. The remodeling of this part of the library could have caused the excessive entry of water on Wednesday afternoon.
According to El País, the humidity could affect not only the books on the top floors, but also the volumes on the lower floors if the problem of the leaks is not resolved immediately. At the moment, water has reached the eleventh floor. Three floors below, there are valuable 17th century volumes that would be badly damaged by this leaking episode.