I went to the oldest bookshop in the world, still open in Lisbon's Chiado

Wherever I travel, I end up circling back to bookshops. It's less a tourist habit than a familial one; my mother told me stories before I could read, and it became a compass I still use in unfamiliar cities.

Porto has the shop that's meant to be the most beautiful in the world, and I didn't make it there this time. Lisbon gave me Livraria Bertrand instead, the world’s oldest operational bookshop. Since 2011, a certificate by the door has confirmed it: this is the oldest bookshop in continuous operation anywhere in the world.

A Frenchman, an earthquake, and a marriage of convenience

The story starts in 1732, when a French bookseller called Pedro Faure opened a small shop on the corner of Rua Direita do Loreto and Rua do Norte. A decade later he took on a partner, Pierre Bertrand, newly arrived from the French Alps, and secured the deal the old-fashioned way, by marrying his daughter to him. When Pierre's brother Jean Joseph joined the business too, it became Bertrand Brothers, and the name outlived everyone who first carried it.

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In 1755, Lisbon shook itself apart. The earthquake that flattened most of the city took the bookshop with it, and Pierre wanted to walk away for good. Jean Joseph refused. For eighteen years the business ran out of a borrowed chapel before finally returning, in 1773, to the rebuilt lower town on Rua Garrett, where it has stood since. Jean Joseph's widow, Marie Claire, took over after him, always in black silk, running a shop known for a stretch as "Bertrand's Widow and Son," which I think is a better name than most of what gets published today.

I keep returning to that decision of Jean Joseph's. Not the earthquake itself, sixty thousand dead is not a number I can properly hold in my head, but the plain stubbornness of one man refusing to close something down. That refusal, made in grief in 1755, is the reason I got to walk into a shop in 2026 and buy a book with a very old name on the stamp.

The gossip you don't get on the plaque

By the nineteenth century, Bertrand had turned into something closer to a club than a shop. Alexandre Herculano showed up every Thursday without fail, to publish his books and to sit in on the tertúlia, Lisbon's standing literary argument. Eça de Queirós, Antero de Quental, Ramalho Ortigão and Oliveira Martins were regulars too, and the crowd ran grand enough that the exiled Dom Pedro II of Brazil would drop in. Eça liked the place enough to write it into his own fiction; a scene in Os Maias has two characters pausing right outside its door.

There's a darker line in the shop's history. José Fontana, an early manager and a labour organiser whose work fed into what became Portugal's socialist movement, died by suicide inside the old warehouse. The warehouse is now the café.

What it actually feels like now

Walking in, the eighteenth century gives way to whatever this is now, gradually and then all at once. Seven rooms run into each other, each quietly dedicated to a writer, and the stone still prods outward the way old stone does, refusing to be smoothed into anything else. Then there's the café at the far end, sleek, with a mural of Fernando Pessoa on the wall and a girl on her laptop who seemed to be working from there. It left me mildly conflicted about capitalism moving into three centuries of literary history, but glad too that the place still needs to earn its keep.

The English section was smaller than I hoped Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms sat next to an Ana Huang novel. There was a lot of Percival Everett, Portuguese Harry Potter, and, best of all, someone at the counter who stamped my new book ( a Murakami) and told me I was now carrying proof of having bought it from the oldest bookshop on earth.

I had a gelato after. Good bookshop, good holiday. And a small, sincere shoutout to Salted Books elsewhere in Lisbon, doing its own tightly curated work, where I picked up an Anthony Bourdain and a novel called Scaffolding, about two couples and one house and the infidelities that outlast both.