El Archivo de las Índias (the General Archive of the Indies) and the PARES Project: A Brief Introduction and Review

This is a guest post by Raúl Cervera, with special thanks to David Perez Arcé. See information about the author at the end of this piece.

The Archive

In 1785, at the request of King Charles III, El Archivo de las Índias (the General Archive of the Indies) was born with the aim of gathering in one place the documents referring to the Hispanic colonies, until then dispersed in Simancas (Valladolid), Madrid, Cádiz and Seville. The building, Casa Lonja de Sevilla, which was built during the time of Philip II, serves to this day as the headquarters of the archive.

Since then, and in different consignments, the funds of the main Indian institutions have been incorporated: el Consejo de las Indias, la Casa de la Contratación, the consulates etc. Nowadays, the archive has become the main documentary repository for the study of the Spanish Administration in the New World, including a huge amount of documents related to the Hispanic interactions mostly with the American and Asian continent.

Today the General Archive of the Indies preserves more than forty-three thousand files, installed in eight linear kilometers of shelves, with some eighty million pages of original documents that allow investigators like me to delve daily into more than three centuries of history. Thousands of researchers pass through the archive, investigating from the discovery, exploration and conquest of the New World to its independence; from Indian political institutions to the history of pre-Columbian peoples; from commercial exchange to maritime traffic problems; from missionary expansion to inquisitorial aspects. The General Archive of the Indies has been labeled as the most complete and documented historical vision of the Hispanic Administration of the New World.

Picture of la Casa Lonja de Sevilla.

Personal Experience and Functionality

The Digital Orientalist has already published pieces pertaining to the study of the history of Christianity in Japan, which is the field I am currently specializing in. 

For example, James Harry Morris published “The Marega Collection Database: A Review and Introduction” last February. In 2018 he also published “Beyond “Laures Kirishitan Bunko”: Digital Repositories for Studying 16th and 17th Century Japanese Christianity”. As stated in these publications, there have been substantial advances in the field of digitization and transcription of Kirishitan related documents. In this review I wanted to mention the situation in Spain, and to do so I had to talk about the outstanding PARES (Portal de Archivos Españoles) project, which collaborates with the General Archive of the Indies, among other archives. This is the main platform for the dissemination of Spanish Historical Documentary Heritage, created and managed by the Ministry of Culture’s General Sub Directorate of State Archives.

The homepage of the Spanish Archives Portal.

It contains descriptive files and digitized images of the documentary collections preserved in the State Archives. However, PARES does not yet include all the documentation in the archives, due to its enormous volume. The contents are increasing as the archival work of identification, description and digitization of the documents is developed. 

As of June, 2023, there are 5,411,140 published descriptions in PARES, associated with a total of 36,891,394 published digital images/objects. 

So, even though I mentioned in the introduction that most documents related with the interactions of the Hispanic Empire and Asia are in the General Archive of the Indies, researchers are more or less required to start their research by using  PARES as a search engine. This engine’s interface is available in English and, of course, in Spanish.

If the researcher wants to interact with digitized documents from the General Archive of the Indies then these too must be accessed via the PARES database. In this article, I’ll provide a brief review and guide.

One of the main features of the project’s homepage is its “Search” function, but a user may also navigate to the websites of the different state archives from which the documents have been borrowed. This may prove useful if contact with the institutions is needed for specific documents not yet digitized in the PARES database. In my case, I reached the Archive of the Crown of Aragon (ACA) while I was researching about the Tenshō Embassy (1582-1590) and how the Japanese diplomats were treated by the local authorities in Alicante. Being part of the Valencian Kingdom, a region of the Crown of Aragon, all related documents were located there.

Screenshot of the different archives and their locations.

The description of each institution and what can be found within its catalogue is also useful for providing the user with important and extensive historical material and bibliographical information about each collection. 

But let’s get back to the PARES search engine. 

Screenshot of the Advanced Document Search.

To navigate the database users can use the “Search” button for specific documents if they are aware of how they might be registered. For example, for more specific research there’s an “Advanced Document Search” option. If the document has also been transcribed the engine allows the user to search by words (exact phrases, specific words…). Many more parameters can be selected in order to narrow down the options: the user can filter by description indexes, archive of origin, date, language or producer (referring to the issuing institution), for example. There’s also an interesting option on the right side of each parameter, enabling the user to do “fuzzy” searches. This option, in opposition to exact searches, enables the user to widen the parameters a bit and help track down additional sources. 

Moreover, on the right side of the Advanced Document Search (on the top of the interface) there’s an option that enables a search by institutions. This division by administrations has proved useful to me more than once, for example, when I needed access to the recently mentioned documents about Tenshō Embassy.

An Illustrative Test

To show the result of a search, I thought it might be useful to show a test run in order to illustrate what might be expected from the engine. I used the “fuzzy” search to search for any document related to Japan in Spanish (Japón). These are the results:

Screenshot of a list of results.

As can be seen in the above figure, more than 723 pages are available for mentions of Japan. However, searching for Japan is not useful by itself since the results given are clearly too many. What’s interesting is the wide amount of options you can choose from after clicking search in order to narrow the results and navigate between the options.

The main results are on the left and ranked by the amount of documents available (here in the example the key role of the Jesuits as global agents positions them remarkably as the main issuers of documentation on this topic), but on the right, a lot of the categories given in the Advanced Document Search are listed (archive of origin, century, alphabet they’re written in, etc).

Once a category has been selected or a search conducted a list of results appears, helping again to narrow down the options. Clicking on the link of any document provides some information about the document. Additionally the user is able to access the scans of that document, if it has been digitized. Most of the documents are also transcribed, but not many have available translations, so that would be an interesting new idea for the project to invest in, which might improve its accessibility.

Getting back to my example, I selected the category of letters written in mixed alphabets, and was able to use this narrowing of results to come across a letter from Hasekura Tsunenaga (a Japanese diplomat that came to Europe in the Keichō Embassy between 1613 and 1620) to the king Philip III, requesting permission  to depart to Japan.

Screenshot of the letter

The scans are of an excellent quality, and characters don’t get blurry until the user zooms to 300% or more. This enables a comfortable reading on laptops and monitors. I have left a link for the readers to look at the digitized version of the aforenoted letter  in the caption to the image included above.

Nevertheless, scanning quality does vary. It was disappointing to notice, for example, that some notes attached to the documents by additional pieces of paper or in the margins of some documents were not scanned well and tended to be illegible.

Dynamic Inventory and the Archive

To check if the subject of study is within the General Archive of Indies there is also a dynamic inventory – a useful guide on how the archive is classified by the Institution of precedence. This website, although unavailable in English, really easies the path of researchers interested in a particular subject.

Screenshot of the dynamic inventory.

To wrap up, I would like to give my opinion on some topics related to the project.

First of all, I would like to mention that this project has a minor inconvenience related to the languages through which it can be accessed and related to this, its international appeal. Although many researchers interested in documents from the PARES platform or the General Archive of the Indies are expected to have at least a minimum knowledge of Spanish, maybe having something more than the interface in English might prove useful in the future. Providing translations (considering that most digitized documents are already transcribed) at least for important documents might prove an incredible advance and would substantially improve the appeal of the materials to the international public.

It is important to clarify, too, that this digitization project is expected to keep on being developed. There is still work to be done, but the funds invested in it are substantial and the amount of documents uploaded gets larger by the day. 

The information given before the pictures of the documents is incredibly thorough, and the digitization, excluding some exceptions, are of an excellent quality.  

This database grants access to a large collection, and even though less than 10 % of the documentation imported from the General Archive of the Indies is related with Asia, the amount of documents provided are counted by the hundreds. If the user is considering to study or conduct research on the first European interactions recorded with Asia, this ambitious PARES project is by and large amongst the best options, and is, in my opinion, an indispensable resource. 

Raúl Cervera is our 23/24 guest contributor for Japanese studies. Find out more at https://www.linkedin.com/in/raul-cervera-alvarez-18b847236/