The origins of today’s library can be found in Tortosa. In October 1864, the Society of Jesus was able to install itself within an old Franciscan monastery located in Jesús (Tortosa-Roquetes). At that time, the Bishop of Tortosa ceded this space to the Jesuits and donated approximately 4,000 books. That was the start of the library. It was also where the Jesuits opened a Centre for Superior Studies which would serve as the seed for the Faculty of Philosophy and Theology. At the end of the 19th century, the Borja Library received several more important collections through donations, exchanges and the return of the books the Jesuits had lost with their expulsion from Spain in 1767.
Today, the library’s collection includes 270,000 texts including 600 manuscripts including those in Hebrew from a synagogue once found in Tortosa. There are other texts in other languages such as Catalan, Latin, Malaysian, Tamil, Coptic and Ge’ez (the ancient Ethiopian language). The collection includes parchments, 42 rolls, 41 incunabula, 1,127 rare and valuable books, and approximately 21,000 volumes of documents dating from the 16th to 18th centuries as well as other unique items of great historical value.