In total there are 5,107 texts that the writer gave to that house of studies, among them many titles of the greatest exponents of the literature of the XX century personally dedicated to Neruda and his wife, Delia del Carril.

Authors such as Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Paul Eluard and Octavio Paz, among others, left their signatures on some of these copies.

The donation also includes 8,400 shells, 155 records and 263 magazines, according to information from the institution also known as La Casa de Bello, in honor of Andrés Bello, its first rector and a key figure in its foundation.

“I have been collecting these books of universal culture, these shells of all the oceans, and this foam of the seven seas, I give them to the University as a duty of conscience and to pay, in minimal part, what I have received from my people”.

This is what the poet said when in June 1954 he gave his private library to the university, in a ceremony attended by the rector at the time, Juan Gómez Millas, together with Salvador Allende, Volodia Teitelboim, Alejandro Lipschutz, Mireya Lafuente and Jorge Sanhueza.

Today the collection is located in the Neruda Room of the Andrés Bello Central Archive of that institution, where visitors can appreciate this valuable heritage declared a National Historic Monument in 2009.

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