The Archives of the Crown of Aragon: latest news

In recent years an ambitious program of action has been developed regarding the centre's most valuable documentation, especially the Registers of the Royal Chancellery (description, restoration and reprography through microfilm or digitalisation). All the digitised ones from the last twenty years can be consulted online, since the resulting image has been linked to the revised description in the Portal of Spanish Archives (PARES) . From 2023, a boost is being given to the project: digital images of the registers from the reigns of Martin I and Ferdinand I (1396-1416) have been published in PARES.

At present, the information introduced to PARES in previous years through a bulk upload of existing manuscript and typed description tools is being reviewed. In parallel, new descriptions are being added and existing ones expanded, following the international ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF) standards, as well as the rules for the creation of access points of the General Sub-directorate of State Archives.

The descriptions and digital reproductions of the oldest parchments in the archive (fund of the Royal Chancellery) have been published on the PARES portal. There are 2,433 documents dated between the middle of the 9th century and mid-12th century. According to the order of the 18th century, they are distributed by the periods of government of the first seven counts of Barcelona, ​​from Wilfred the Hairy to Ramon Berenguer IV. The parchments have different origins. Some belonged to the counts of Barcelona, and others to the counts of Pallars Jussà, before that county was incorporated into the Crown of Aragon, at the end of the 12th century. Most, however, come from the monastery of Sant Joan de les Abadesses and entered the archive in the 17th century as a result of a lawsuit. Among the documents, the chronicle of the separation of the kingdom of Navarra from that of Aragon.

The complete archive of the Commercial Court of Catalonia has just been made available to the public on PARES. It was fully identified and described between 2022 and 2024, thanks to the first edition of the TándEM-Archives project (funded by European funds under the Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan). The work covered a total of 9,778 documentary units, grouped by Lawsuits, Sea Protests, and Files.