General Archive of the Indies

The General Archive of the Indies came into being in 1785 at the behest of King Charles III, for the purpose of collecting in a single place all the documents referring to the colonies in the Indies, which had until then been dispersed around the towns of Simancas, Cadiz and Seville.

It is housed in the emblematic building known as the Casa Lonja de Mercaderes in Seville, built by the architect Juan de Herrera. It contains over 43,000 documents, with some 80 million pages of original papers which occupy eight linear kilometres of shelving. These collections comprise an exceptional source which provides the opportunity to scrutinise over three centuries of the history of America (from Tierra de Fuego to the southern United States) and Asia (the Philippines).