Isla Negra

Isla Negra, Books & Arts

Isla Negra offers the experience and the poetry of the book, the sensuality of objects and the force of art. It does so with things that pass from hand to hand: things with a life, with stories to tell, things that get people talking. Like the things Pablo Neruda treasured in his house at Isla Negra.

Our island is made mainly of books, and also of art and objects. We have a weakness for glass, an eagerness for contemporary art, and books move our life. Our shelves and baskets fill up with old volumes and manuscripts, rare books, first editions, second-hand books and, as Neruda would say, books sacred and well-thumbed, books devoured, devouring, secret.

We are a multidisciplinary team that learns, enjoys, turns life into culture and shares it. We work with books and we know about books and reading; we work with art and we know something about that too. We are an island of the shipwrecked, the curious, readers, bibliophiles, historians, collectors, palaeographers, artists, writers.

Isla Negra is culture and, at the same time, a cultural space. For more than six years we have been putting on cultural events: exhibitions devoted to contemporary art and literature, book launches, talks, workshops and music events. We keep creating content and proposals that revolve around our changing, endless collection, being good neighbours and actively sharing our philosophy online.

Enthusiasm, vocation and pleasure shape a singular and very personal project, where the old and the contemporary live together in surroundings that are hedonistic to the senses and elegant in spirit, with a jazz soundtrack. Our Isla Negra, like the poet’s, is a place to find things and to come across them.

Isla Negra is: Antonio Durán (ideas man, collector and lover of beautiful things), Alba Romero (bookseller and gallerist) and Mónica López Soler (collaborator), along with other colleagues and specialists who work with us from time to time.