Bertrand Chiado Has Seen It All! The Oldest Bookstore in The World!

They say the older the wine is the better the taste is. That is exactly how we feel about old books, libraries, and bookstores. There is something about old books that is fascinating, the crumbled pages, “the old book smell,”  the idea that it has been around for centuries, is just awe inspiring. (ok, you get it, we are suckers for old books).

Recently we’ve talked about the most beautiful library in the world, and now we’ve decided to take a sneak peek in the oldest bookstore in the world.

We don’t know why we expected the oldest bookstore to be somewhere in Britain, we guess because of Shakespeare or something like that, but we couldn’t be more wrong.  The oldest bookstore,  dating to 1732 is located at the typical Portugal-street Rua Garrett in Chiado, Lisbon.
Bertrand Chiado is officially the oldest bookshop in the world that is still working, and this title was officialized by Guinness Book of Records in 2011.

However, according to Wikipedia, the oldest bookshop is the Moravian Book Store in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, founded in 1745. Nevertheless, we decided to stick with Bertrand Chiado.