Livraria Esperança

Funchal


This huge shop selling secondhand and new books fills an entire palace and claims to stock more than 100,000 titles, making it Portugal's largest. Most of the books are in Portuguese but there is a foreign-language section. It's a great place to pick up obscure books on Madeiran history, natural history and the like, plus guidebooks and maps.


Lonely Planet's must-see attractions

Nearby Funchal attractions

1. Pereira D'Oliveira

0.03 MILES

Run by the fifth generation of the D'Oliveira family, this is Funchal's most easily accessible wine experience. Anyone can enter the strongly aromatic…

2. Igreja do Colégio

0.07 MILES

Funchal's Jesuit Church dominates the city's prettiest square, Praça do Município. No surface is left unadorned in the baroque interior with its azulejos,…

3. Borges

0.09 MILES

Borges is the smallest of Funchal's Madeira wine operations and its diminutive, timber-rich tasting room feels like the furthest away from the tourist…

4. Museu de Arte Sacra

0.1 MILES

Housed in the former 16th-century bishop's palace dominating the south side of Praça do Município, Madeira's most fascinating art collection is a major…

5. Museu Photographia Vicentes

0.12 MILES

Set up by Vicente Gomes da Silva in 1865, this exquisitely preserved photographic studio, above a shady cobbled courtyard, was in use until 1982. The…

6. Museu de História Natural

0.17 MILES

This old-fashioned museum, housed (in classic Funchal fashion) in a surplus palace, has an ageing aquarium on the ground floor, and stuffed local fauna,…

7.

0.19 MILES

Funchal's 16th-century cathedral once oversaw the world's largest diocese – all of Portugal’s overseas territories from Madeira to Brazil to Angola – and…

8. Casa-Museu Frederico de Freitas

0.19 MILES

Built by the counts of Calçada in the 17th century, this tasteful mansion was purchased by a local lawyer, Frederico de Freitas, in the 1940s. An avid…