As a Spanish language teaching specialist I need to always be surrounded by books, magazines, newspapers… written material of any kind related with or about the Spanish language, preferably in Spanish.
Before the advent of the digital era, most written documents were only available as hard copies, i.e. printed on paper. Nowadays, lots of cultural institutions from everywhere - especially libraries - are bringing their written treasures online for the benefit of humanity.
Today I navigated the august pages of the Biblioteca Nacional de España (The National Library of Spain) and found to my surprise, that they still haven’t put their books online; however they say on the website, that they’re planning to do so soon. Nevertheless, they have a hemeroteca digital which includes newspapers and magazines from Spain that were first published the 1800’s.
Also today I visited the Biblioteca Ayacucho. Here there are a number of treasures from Spanish and Hispanic American literature, in PDF format, which can be downloaded for free. I downloaded the book Comentarios Reales by Garcilaso de la Vega from this website. This is a classic book that I’ve been searching for a long time. I finally found it and it didn’t cost me a cent!
I will be adding here some more ‘bibliotecas digitales’ and other sites containing digitalized written material as I get to find them. The only point of concern is that getting to find these websites and exploring what they offer (and writing a post like this), is consuming my time as if there isn’t other things to do; such as taking a break from the pc, which I must… 
Some last words though…I have added these two magnificent websites to my blogroll here. Enjoy!
Filed under: Culture, Education, Language, Language learning, Spanish, Spanish Language Learning
