General Archive of the Indies
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General Archive of the Indies | |
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Native name Spanish: Archivo General de Indias | |
Location | Seville, Andalusia, Spain |
Coordinates | 37°23′02″N 5°59′31″W / 37.384°N 5.992°W |
Built | 16th century |
Architect | Juan de Herrera Juan de Mijares |
Architectural style(s) | Renaissance |
Europe | |
The Archivo General de Indias (Spanish pronunciation: [aɾˈtʃiβo xeneˈɾal de ˈindjas]; lit. 'General Archive of the Indies'), housed in the ancient merchants' exchange of Seville, Spain, the Casa Lonja de Mercaderes, is the repository of extremely valuable archival documents illustrating the history of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Asia. The building itself, an unusually serene and Italianate example of Spanish Renaissance architecture, was designed by Juan de Herrera. This structure and its contents were registered in 1987 by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site together with the adjoining Seville Cathedral and the Alcázar of Seville.
Structure
The origin of the structure dates to 1572 when
The building, known as the Lonja, was begun in 1584 by
The building encloses a large central patio with ranges of two storeys, the windows set in slightly sunken panels between flat
In the aftermath of a devastating plague in 1649, the building appears to have been abandoned by merchants by 1660. From 1660 to 1674, one of its rooms was used as a painting academy established by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. By the 18th century, the building's upper floor had been partitioned for use as apartments.[1]: 128
Creation of the archive
On 12 March 1784,
Galvez communicated the idea to King Charles III, who on 27 June 1784 issued a letter instructing Muñoz to draft a proposal for the work needed to convert the building into the Archive of the Indies.[1]: 130 In February 1785, Charles III approved a decree for the creation of the archives according the proposed plans.[1]: viii The project was to bring together under a single roof all the documentation regarding the overseas empire, which until that time had been dispersed among various archives, as Simancas, Cádiz and Seville.[2]
Responsibility for the project was delegated to José de Gálvez, Secretary for the Indies, who depended on the historian Juan Bautista Muñoz for the plan's execution. Two basic motivations underlay the project; in addition to the lack of space in the Archivo General de Simancas, the central archive of the Spanish Crown, there was also the expectation, in the spirit of the Enlightenment, that Spanish historians would take up the history of Spain's colonial empire. It was decided that, for the time being, documents evolved after 1760 would remain with their primary institutions.
The first cartloads of the documents arrived in October 1785. Some restructuring of the Casa Lonja to accommodate the materials was required, and a grand marble staircase was added in 1787 after the designs of Lucas Cintara.
Contents
The archives are rich with autograph material from the first of the
Today, the Archivo General de Indias houses some nine kilometers of shelving, in 43,000 volumes and some 80 million pages, which were produced by the colonial administration:
- Consejo de Indias, 16th–19th centuries
- Casa de la Contratación, 16th–18th centuries
- Consulados de Sevilla y Cádiz, 16th–19th centuries
- Secretarías de Estado y Despacho Universal de Indias, de Estado, Gracia y Justicia, Hacienda y Guerra, 18th–19th centuries
- Secretaría del Juzgado de Arribadas de Cádiz, 18th–19th centuries
- Comisaría Interventora de la Hacienda Pública de Cádiz, Dirección General de la Renta de Correos, 18th–19th centuries
- Sala de Ultramar del Tribunal de Cuentas, 19th century
- Real Compañía de la Habana, 18th–19th centuries
The structure underwent a thorough restoration in 2002–2004, without interrupting its function as a research library. As of 2005[update], its 15 million pages are in the process of being digitized. The digitized sources are accessible online [3]
References
- ^ ISBN 978-1-60606-773-4.
- ^ Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2001, p. 170.
- ^ "Portal de Archivos Españoles". pares.mcu.es. 18 May 2018.
External links
- (in Spanish) website of the Archive
- (in Spanish) virtual tour of the Archive
- (in Spanish) Monumentos de Sevilla: Archivo de Indias
- (in Spanish) Fernando Bruner Prieto, "El Archivo General de Indias de Sevilla, Sagrario de la Hispanidad"
- (in Spanish) Interactive 360° panorama from Plaza del Triunfo with Cathedral, Alcázar and Archivo General de Indias (Java, highres, 0,9 MB)