The National Library of Spain has opened an exhibition in Madrid dedicated to Luís de Camões, presenting the Portuguese writer as a literary counterpart to Miguel de Cervantes. The exhibition was inaugurated on Tuesday by King Felipe VI and Portuguese President António José Seguro and will run until 14 February 2027, bringing the celebrations for Camões’s 500th anniversary to a close.
On display in the library’s Sala Recoletos are 128 items selected from more than 300, mainly manuscripts and other documents from the 16th century. The exhibition explores how Camões and Cervantes helped transform their respective languages through literary innovation, moving them towards modern forms.
Curated by Aurelio Vargas Díaz-Toledo, a professor of Romance philology at the Complutense University of Madrid, the exhibition is arranged in four thematic sections. These trace Portugal’s national narrative, the intellectual climate that shaped Camões, the poet’s literary world—with his 1572 epic “Os Lusíadas” at its centre—and his influence across later centuries.
The displays include early editions of Camões’s works, books by Renaissance authors such as Petrarch, and projections related to Portuguese and Spanish voyages. They also feature an early Portuguese translation of “Don Quixote” that was censored, including the scene in which Don Quixote mistakes Maritornes’s breath for a heavenly perfume.
The final section follows Camões’s reception in Spain, from translations that sought to establish him in the Spanish literary canon from the 17th century onwards to later Spanish-language writers who drew on his work, including Antonio Machado, Jorge Luis Borges and Antonio Muñoz Molina. Díaz-Toledo says the exhibition aims to introduce Camões to a wider Spanish audience and highlight the shared influences behind the development of Spanish and Portuguese literature.
Sources: El País Cultura.