Resources and Collection

The Instituto Cervantes library was created in 1991 and inherited the library of the Instituto de España, which opened in London in 1946. The majority of its collection is in Spanish but there are also books and films in the other official Spanish languages (Catalan, Galician and Basque) as well as English.

Books

Reference books: encyclopedias and dictionaries
Spanish and Latin American literature
Children's and young adult literature
Books about history, art, philosophy, politics, enconomics and sociology

Periodicals

Newspaper: El País
Cultural, linguistic and literary magazines

Video library

Spanish and Latin American films (VHS, DVD)
Documentaries
Spanish TV series and cartoons

Resource Center for Students and Teachers

Grammar and dictionaries
Graded reading
Teaching and learning Spanish as a Foreign Language (books, videos, DVDs, cassettes and CD-ROMs)
Exams and exercises

Music

Latin, pop, rock, flamenco, jazz, singer-songwriter and classic music.

E-Resources

The libraries of the Instituto Cervantes have made available to its users a collection of Electronic resources (e-resources). These are collections of information that are accessed on an electronic device, such as a computer, IPAD, mobile phone etc.:

Reference Works such as yearbooks, bibliographies, directories, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc...
Databases (bibliographic and full text articles and documents).
Digital press.

See full list

Audiobooks

The Instituto Cervantes’ library offers to its members a new service of e-audiobooks. The aim of this project is to facilitate a new way of approaching reading in Spanish.

Audiobooks are recordings of book content, read aloud by a narrator. The recordings are read by a single voice, without any background music and are whole versions of the original books, presented in MP3 format.