Archive of the Indies
We couldn’t leave Seville without visiting its third UNESCO World Heritage Site, Archivo General de Indias (General Archive of the Indies). It’s located between the other prestigious sites, the Seville Cathedral and the Royal Alcazar. The Archive is not nearly as popular, so it was not crowded at all. Admission was free. And I loved it!
In 1572, the Archbishop of Seville complained about merchants conducting business inside the cathedral when it was raining or too hot outside. The Casa Lonja (Market House) was constructed as a mercantile exchange, and served this purpose from 1598 to about 1660. In 1784, the Lonja was selected as the location for a new centralized archive for all documents related to the Spanish colonies in the Americas and Asia. After some renovations, the Archive was opened in 1790.
In contrast to the (mostly) Gothic-style Cathedral and the (largely) Mudéjar-style Alcazar, the Archive was Spanish Renaissance-style. On the first floor, we could see into the inner courtyard. There was a cannon from the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha, which sank in the Florida Keys in 1622. (I remember meeting Mel Fisher, the treasure hunter who found the shipwrecked Atocha, on a visit to Key West in the mid-1980s. He let me try on a gold chain recovered from the wreckage!)
There was a small exhibit showcasing documents in the Archive that are in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register because of their historic significance. Replicas of the original documents were on display. They included:
Capitulations of Santa Fe (1492) - Contract between Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabel I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon
Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) - Agreement negotiated by Pope Alexander VI in which the New World was divided between Spain and Portugal
Records from the Spice Expedition (1519-1522) - Ship’s logbooks and manifests from the first circumnavigation of the world (begun by Ferdinand Magellan and completed by Juan Sebastián Elcano)
Vocabularies (late 18th century) - Translations of Spanish words into Quechua and other indigenous languages of America, Asia, and Oceania
We climbed a magnificent marble staircase to the second level. The front room was a small museum with portraits of Spanish conquistadors and artifacts from the Casa Lonja. The highlight was a German-made strongbox for storing money and valuables. There was a sophisticated iron locking system on the underside of the lid that operated sixteen latches!
My favorite part of the Archives was here on the upper level: the long corridors lined with wooden shelves for document storage. It was peacefully quiet, like a library. The striking patterns on the floors and vaulted ceilings were hypnotic.
The Archive’s holdings (about 80 million pages!) are now securely stored in a nearby building which is the actual research library, so the boxes on these shelves were just for display. We imagined how it might have looked 200+ years ago, with wooden tables down the center and staff hard at work, sorting and filing documents arriving by the cartload from other parts of Spain.
