Biblioteca Joaquín Leguina building, Regional library in Madrid, Spain

The Biblioteca Regional Joaquín Leguina occupies the former El Águila brewery in the Arganzuela district of Madrid. The complex, built of reddish brick, combines industrial aesthetics with Neo-Mudéjar architecture across several buildings of different volumes, and its ceramic corporate signs are still preserved. It opened as a library on 10 December 2002.

The El Águila brewery complex was built between 1912 and 1914 to a project by architect Eugenio Jiménez Corera, then enlarged between 1915 and 1935 by Luis Sainz de los Terreros, who added coach houses, process modules, cellars, silos and the ice house. Brewing stopped in 1985, and after a 1994 competition the site was converted; Emilio Tuñón and Luis Moreno Mansilla won the redesign. The Regional Library opened on 10 December 2002 and the Archive on 28 April 2003.

The library takes its name from Joaquín Leguina, the first president of the Community of Madrid after the Transition. Its Madrilenian Collection holds some 80,000 documents from the 17th century to the present, and since March 1989 it has received one copy of every work published in Madrid through legal deposit, about 50,000 items a year.

The complex stands in the Delicias neighbourhood of Arganzuela, beside the railway tracks that once served the brewery. The library occupies the old El Águila brewery, and the Archivo Regional de la Comunidad de Madrid shares the same site, having opened there on 28 April 2003. Look for the ceramic corporate signs kept on the brick façades.

The brewery's ceramic corporate signs survive on the brick facades, and the complex was built beside the railway tracks, to which it was directly connected for deliveries. The library opened on 10 December 2002, named after Joaquín Leguina, the first president of the Madrid autonomous community.