Livraria Lello has been called the world’s most beautiful bookstore, and its Neo-Gothic exterior façade and interior winding wooden staircase draw more than 1 million visitors a year, making it one of the most popular tourist destinations in Porto—Portugal’s second-largest city. Meanwhile, the book shop’s charitable arm, the Livraria Lello Foundation, aims to use reading, knowledge and culture to promote critical thinking. An exhibition currently staged at the foundation’s new headquarters examines the effects of misinformation and disinformation, a subject that Portuguese people have been particularly concerned about recently.
The Livraria Lello Foundation opened its new headquarters in June in Leça do Balio, about a 15-minute drive from Porto, in a 14th-century Gothic monastery renovated by the famed Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, who also designed the Iberê Camargo Foundation building in Porto Alegre, Brazil; the Amore Pacific Research & Design Center just outside of Seoul, South Korea; and the Bonjour Tristesse building in Berlin. The monastery’s renovation transformed it into a cultural centre, complete with areas for performances, meeting venues and a gift shop.
A view of the church in Leça do Balio, with JR's photographic intervention seen on the left side Courtesy Livraria Lello Foundation
According to legend, the original monastery and surrounding complex were built on the remains of a temple to the Roman god Jupiter, but the first Christian church was built on the site around the 10th century. Two centuries later, the area was donated to the Knights Hospitaller, who protected pilgrims travelling on the Portuguese route of the Camino de Santiago. While the monastery has not been used for religious purposes in centuries—more recently, it served as a holiday home for the Ramos Pinto family, well-known winemakers in the region—the church next door, Santa Maria de Leça do Balio, is still a functioning Catholic church. In June, to celebrate the opening of the Livraria Lello Foundation, the French artist JR installed 1,500 portraits he took of Porto residents on a busy city street and near a train station onto the church square. The project drew people to the foundation’s opening to see if their photograph had been used.
The Livraria Lello Foundation headquarters’ debut exhibition on misinformation, Act the Thought (until June 2025), is a natural fit because of the ties between a book shop and media consumption, says Francisca Pedro Pinto, the foundation’s creative director. Misinformation and disinformation were also listed as the most severe short-term risks facing the world by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in January, she adds.
The exhibition comes at a critical time in Portuguese politics. In March, a centre-right alliance won the country’s general election by a small margin as a far-right populist party—Chega, Portuguese for enough—made the largest gains since the group was founded in 2019, coming in third and challenging Portugal’s two main parties. Chega has been accused of doctoring footage posted on social media, and has called journalists who reported on the matter "enemies of the people". The snap elections were called in the wake of a corruption scandal that saw the prime minister, António Costa, resign after investigators searching his chief of staff's office found €75,800 stuffed in bookshelves.
According to last month’s Reuters Digital News Report 2024, Portuguese citizens are more concerned about disinformation on the internet than the global average. While the average of the 47 countries analysed found that 59% of people were worried about fake news online, 72% of Portuguese people polled expressed the concern.
Act the Thought notes that misinformation is particularly dangerous because of the implications it has for a wide range of issues affecting society. With nearly 3 billion people scheduled to cast ballots in countries including India, the UK and the US over the next two years, misinformation threatens to undermine the legitimacy of elections worldwide. The WEF outlined in its January report that unrest could follow, ranging from violent protests to an increase in hate crimes and terrorism. Misinformation will be particularly dangerous over the next decade, as the world witnesses even more catastrophic effects of climate change, which is tied to a number of other risks the WEF ranked as top issues, including involuntary migration, pollution and geoeconomic confrontations.
Act the Thought is a text-heavy exhibition that shows visitors how text and images can be manipulated to portray false or misleading narratives, and how misinformation affects elections, climate change and other world issues. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Livraria Lello Foundation and the North America and Europe chapter of the Unesco Media and Information Literacy Alliance, along with Polígrafo—a Portuguese fact-checking news outlet that helped write the show’s captions and presentation materials. A slideshow on display shows how old images of civilians injured in military violence are often reused online and shared with misleading context that makes viewers believe the photographs are from a current conflict, demonising one side or group of people in the process.
A guest sits in the renovated monastery and experiences Diana Policarpo's sound installation Courtesy Livraria Lello Foundation
In addition to a wealth of informative text, the exhibition features a sound installation by the Portuguese artist Diana Policarpo that uses labour songs sung by women to explore how gossip as a source of information has been characterised throughout history—from a way to express friendship to its role in European witch hunts in the Middle Ages. Elsewhere in the exhibition, visitors are able to take home seven-page newspapers dedicated to figures who stand for freedom of speech, like the education activist Malala Yousafzai, author Salman Rushdie and artist Ai Weiwei.
The Livraria Lello Foundation says it has welcomed an average of about 250 visitors a day since Act the Thought opened in June. While this number is still far from the roughly 3,500 people who visit the Livraria Lello bookstore each day, the foundation is happy with the figure—especially considering that it has not yet advertised itself to international tourists, who have been flocking to Porto in increasing numbers. Thus far, visitors have been largely Portuguese, many of them drawn by a curiosity to see the monastery after Siza’s renovations.
In addition to its foundation’s exhibition, Livraria Lello has worked to broaden customers’ horizons by publishing classic dystopian novels with new, exclusive covers by the American artist Mike Perry in a project called The Dystopias. Perry has created colourful, eye-catching designs for Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, The War of The Worlds by H.G. Wells and The Iron Heel by Jack London in a move to attract new readers. Livraria Lello has published all three in English, Spanish and Portuguese, and they can be purchased at the foundation’s gift shop—for visitors inspired by Act the Thought to explore possible futures under an authoritarian rule of misinformation.