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Spain Archives and Libraries


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  • Archives collect and preserve original documents of organizations such as churches or governments. Libraries generally collect published sources such as books, maps, and microfilm.
  • If you plan to visit a repository, contact them and ask for information about their collection, hours, services, and fees. Ask if they require you to have a reader’s ticket (a paper indicating you are a responsible researcher) to view the records, and ask how to obtain one.
  • Although the records you need may be in an archive or library, the FamilySearch Library may have microfilmed and/or digitized copies of them.
  • Genealogically speaking Spanish archives can be divided into several categories.
  • Civil archives can be found for  various levels of civil government. For example, municipal, comarca, or provincial.
  • Church archives - typically this relates to Catholic Church archives.
  • Private archives which can be stand alone archives, or part of a civil or church archive.
  • University archives - contain a wide variety of records.
  • Military archives. These can be divided by branch of service and also by time period.

Directories of Archives

Censo Guía de Archivos de España e Iberoamérica

Select country, autonomous community, province, and municipality. Click "Search" or "Buscar". An entry for each archive details address, telephone, fax, email, and website link.

The Guide Census (Censo Guía) is an electronic guide and archive directory of Spain and Ibero-America that allows citizens to immediately locate archive centers. At first the guide was limited to Spanish archives; later its scope has been extended to other countries in the Hispanic sphere.[1]

PARES the Portal de Archivos Españoles

Another directory of archives throughout Spain and Latin America, is PARES or the Portal de Archivos Españoles. The site provides hours, services, addresses, and inventories for each provincial archive. To learn more about the website PARES and how to use it, please see, PARES, The Portal de Archivos Españoles.

Government Archives

Civil Archives

Civil archives include government archives from the National level all the way down to the civil registration office.

Provincial Archives

Provincial archives are very important in family history research. The most important records in the provincial archives are the notarial records or Protocolos. These records include: wills, land and property sales, death inventories, marriage contracts, and many other types.

Municipal Archives and Juzgado de la Paz Archivos

These archives are sometimes together, but when they are separated you will find civil registration records in the Juzgado de la Paz archives.
Municipal archives contain local census, tax, military draft records, and other records full of genealogical value

Church Archives (Catholic Church)

  • This .pdf guide contains the detailed description of the one hundred and seventy major ecclesiastical archives of Spain (cathedral, diocesan, monastic and conventual) with address and telephone information, and of the 23,000 parish archives belonging to the sixty-seven dioceses of the Church in Spain.
  • Starting on "xvii" is an alphabetical list of each municipality, with beginning dates of records of baptism, confirmation, marriages, deaths.
  • Starting on page 649, the descriptions of each diocese are given with address and telephone, collection information, and a detailed list of parishes with the dates of baptism, marriage, confirmation, and death records deposited with the diocese.
  • No tables of contents are provided. Use your computer's "Find" feature to jump the location name of the diocese of parish you need.

Parish Archives

Parish archives are listed under each municipality. Address and telephone are given, and sometimes e-mail and website. See instructions above.

Parish archives maintain the parish books for their own parish. Most of the surviving parish records in Spain have been centralized to the Diocesan Archive. However, records that are not more than 100 years old and those that were never sent to the Diocesan archive are kept/stored in the parish archive. The parish records most common and most relevant to family history: baptisms, confirmations, marriages, and deaths/burials.

Diocesan Archives

Each diocese has an archive where they have centralized the parish records within its boundaries. The archives usually have all the parish records that are older than 100 years old, plus any diocesan records. Diocesan records in Spain include: marriage dispensations, ecclesiastic personnel records, judicial materials, pastoral visits and confirmations.

Libraries

Biblioteca Nacional de España

Website
Catalogues Collections Services

Recoletos Headquarters
Biblioteca Nacional de España
Paseo de Recoletos, 20-22
28071 Madrid, Spain
Telephone: 0034 91 580 78 00

Headquarters Alcalá
Biblioteca Nacional de Espana
Road from Alcalá de Henares to Meco, Km 1'600.
28805 Madrid, Spain
Telephone: 0034 91 883 24 02

Museums

Biblioteca Nacional de España also has a museum collection.

Record Offices

Ministerio de Justicia

  • Spain does have a national index or central repository for civil registration (Ministerio de Justicia). Researchers can solicit the Ministerio de Justicia online for copies of certificates.
  • Requests must have: name of deceased, date when event ocurred (birth, marriage, or death), and where the event occured. Parents' names will also be required when asking for a birth certificate.
  • For more information on how to order these records online, please see the article Order Spain Vital Records Online.
  • If you understand Spanish, you may want to view this short video that explains how to order a birth certificate online from the Ministry of Justice in Spain. The process is virtually the same to order a marriage or death certificate.

References

  1. ↑ "History", at Censo Guía de Archivos de España e Iberoamérica, http://censoarchivos.mcu.es/CensoGuia/historia.htm, accessed 2 November 2022.
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