Municipal Archives

History of the Alcázar de San Juan Archive

As for the history of the Archive, it was originally located for many years in the tower of the old Alcázar City Hall. This is the first documented installation of where the archive of this locality was located. The second location was in the so-called town halls. Subsequently, the archive collection was moved to different municipal facilities, such as the basement of the old Casino of Alcázar, the upper floor of the Casa de la Cultura, until its final location in the historical archive room of the Patronato Municipal de Cultura. From then on, a definitive impulse was given to the organization of the documentary collection with its standardized filing and organization in 31 sections, making it possible to consult the Archive. The oldest documentation preserved in the historical collection of Alcázar de San Juan was classified, corresponding to a chronology between 1300 and 1900. It was not until the end of the 20th century, when José Fernando Sánchez Bódalo began to describe a Catalog of the Municipal Historical Archive of Alcázar de San Juan. Since 1988 the Historical Archive has been located at Goya Street n. º 1 and the rest in dependencies of the current town hall of Alcázar de San Juan, unorganized. In 2002, Amelia Baquero Quintana began to organize the second part of the Historical Archive’s collection, with dates from 1883 to 1951. Also this year, descriptive identification sheets were created on paper. During 2004, with sporadic work by Francisco José Atienza Santiago, both parts of the archive collection were merged into a single repository, respecting their original organization, classification and identification, but adapting both parts to the same classification chart, unique for the entire collection, and the documentation began to be described in ISAD (G), using a database created in Access. The history of the documentation kept in the archive has undergone various vicissitudes throughout its history. At the end of the 17th century, allusion is made to the lack or non-existence of an inventory of the archive and in 1690 a decree appears in the municipal minutes of November 11, to spend some money from the tax accounts to make shelves for the archive papers. It seems that the complaints about the lack of inventory, as well as the placement of shelves, had an effect, since in 1739, the first known inventory of the existing documentation in the archive since 1475 was created. On July 14, 1800, the council agreed to keep the half bushel measure on file. At the beginning of the 19th century, the documentation of the Alcazar archive was in disarray and confusion, due to different historical events such as the War of Independence. Already in the second half of the 19th century, during the First Republic, the archives were neglected and ignored. In some neighboring populations, it led to their elimination, abandonment or non-protection. Alcazar de San Juan is one of the only institutions that has been able to preserve as far as possible its documentary heritage, but the vicissitudes of time, local problems such as location, historical events of the twentieth century have deteriorated in part causing unrecoverable documentary gaps.

Open File

The Archive is public, so anyone who needs it can visit it within the established hours.

Activities

Within the Municipal Archives, different dissemination activities are organized, such as the International Archives Day, which takes place on June 9. Several exhibitions; collaborations in congresses, in radio with a weekly program. The Archive has a series of publications with the objective of disseminating research, which are the following: Revista Digital de Historia Salitre and Cuadernos Mínimos Tesela. In addition, a Local History Workshop is organized on an annual basis.