El Ateneo Grand Splendid

Push through the doors from Avenida Santa Fe, and the noise of buses and taxis drops away almost at once. The air inside is cool and still. It carries the dry, sweet smell of paper and the faint scent of coffee drifting from somewhere far ahead. Look up. Above you, a painted ceiling curves over rows of gilded balconies. This is a bookshop... but it was built as a theatre, and it has never really forgotten that.

Welcome to El Ateneo Grand Splendid. You are standing on what used to be the main floor of a performance hall. Where you see tables stacked with novels and travel guides, rows of velvet seats once faced the stage. The shape of the room is unchanged. The horseshoe of balconies, the boxes, the carved details, the great painted dome — they all remain. Only the purpose has shifted, from watching stories to reading them.

The building opened in 1919 as the Teatro Grand Splendid. Buenos Aires at that time was one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Immigrants from Italy and Spain were arriving by the shipload. Grain and beef exports were filling the city with money. That money went into grand avenues, opera houses and theatres, many of them built in the style of Paris. This hall was part of that wave of confidence, built in a neighbourhood where wealthy families lived in elegant townhouses.

The man behind it was Max Glücksmann, an impresario who worked in film, music and recording. He saw the theatre as more than a stage. He was a key figure in the early recording industry in Argentina, and his business recorded many tango musicians. Tango at this time was moving from the dance halls of the port into respectable society. This building became one of the places where that change was heard, performed and captured on record.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. The building was also home to a radio station, Radio Splendid. In the 1920s, radio was new and thrilling. Voices and music from this address travelled out across the city, into living rooms and cafés. Tango singers, including, according to many accounts, the great Carlos Gardel, performed here. So when you walk these aisles, you are moving through a space that once helped carry Argentine music to the whole country.

In the late 1920s, the theatre turned into a cinema. It is often described as one of the first places in Buenos Aires to show films with sound. Imagine the audience in these seats, hearing voices come from a screen for the first time. For decades after that, the hall worked as a movie palace. Like many grand cinemas around the world, though, it eventually faced competition from television and smaller multiplex screens.

At the end of the twentieth century, the building faced an uncertain future. Many old theatres in cities everywhere were simply torn down. Instead, a bookselling company took over the lease and turned it into a bookshop, which opened around the year 2000. The architects made a careful choice. They did not gut the interior. They kept the balconies, the boxes, the ornament and the ceiling, and they placed bookshelves into the existing shape of the room.

Now lift your eyes to that ceiling. The painting is the work of an Italian artist, Nazareno Orlandi. It is an allegory of peace, painted in the years just after the First World War. You can see figures floating among clouds and soft, pale colours. Allegory simply means that each figure stands for an idea rather than a real person. After years of war in Europe, a painting about peace over a place of music and gathering had a clear meaning for its first audiences.

Walk toward the back of the hall, where the stage once stood. It is still there, raised above the floor and framed by heavy red curtains. Today it holds a café. People sit at small tables with coffee and medialunas, the sweet Argentine croissants, right where actors and musicians once stood. It is one of the few places in the world where you can have breakfast on a theatre stage. Look back from there, and you see the whole room as a performer once did.

The balconies and boxes are worth a slow climb. The private boxes, where wealthy families once watched the show, now work as small reading rooms. Some have chairs where you can sit with a book and look down on the main floor. From the upper levels, the shelves form curving lines that follow the old seating. The higher you go, the more you understand the building as one single shape, built for sound and for sight.

The bookshop has earned wide attention far beyond Argentina. International newspapers and travel magazines have placed it on lists of the most beautiful bookshops in the world, sometimes at the very top. That fame brings crowds. Yet many people here are local readers, browsing the Spanish-language shelves, buying school books or a gift. Buenos Aires has a strong culture of reading, with many bookshops for its size, and this place belongs to that everyday habit as much as to tourism.

It helps to know how to move through the space. The main floor is the busiest, and it is where most people take photographs. The upper balconies are often calmer. Staff generally welcome visitors, but remember this is a working shop, not a museum. People are here to read and to buy. Speaking quietly, keeping the aisles clear, and perhaps buying a book or a coffee is a simple way to say thank you to the place.

Before you leave, stand still for a moment in the middle of the floor. Notice the soft murmur of voices, the sound of pages turning, the clink of cups from the stage. Look once more at the painted figures overhead, and at the red curtains framing the café. When you step back out onto Avenida Santa Fe, glance up at the facade. Behind those walls, a theatre from 1919 is still at work... only now, the audience brings the stories home with them.