Just got back from a very fruitful time in Seville and a very recharging holiday season with family and friends in London.
Notable steps forward with the PhD project since the last update include excellent finds at the Archivo General de Indias. Although I did not get a chance to meet up with Manuel Ocampo this time around, I made major breakthroughs at the archives in Seville.
The Archivo General de Indias was established in Seville in 1785. It is the custodian of the archives produced by the institutions created by the Spanish central administration for the government and administration for the Spanish territories created overseas… It is a continental archive which sections occupy almost 49,000 sets of documents and 9 kilometres of shelves.
As to what can be referred to as a the chronological scope, there is more than four centuries shown in the pages of its documents : from 1492, when there was the first contact with the new world, until its independence in the first third of the nineteenth century. There are also fonds which are conserved that reach to the second third of the nineteenth century which concern the Philippine and Cuban Islands, as these were kept as provinces of Spain until 1898.
Lazaro, Pilar (2010). The General Archive of Indias. Secreteria General Tecnica: Ministerio de Cultura, Spain. p. 9.
I researched the entire Philippine ‘Mapas y Planos’ collection of the Archives, 387 documents in all, and managed to get through a tenth of the general drawings. In all, I have looked at, and loosely catalogued over 500 documents from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. A majority of the archives consist of city and building plans of Manila and surrounding area. Also included in this collection are some early navigational maps by Spanish explorers and even some Chinese maps of the area. Other interesting images I have found include some drawing of the local people and visual interpretations of the oddities the Spanish seemingly encountered.
More importantly, I have started a working relationship with the Seville archive and as a result they have made more than 15% of their archived maps and images of the Philippines available online at: http://www.mcu.es/index.html. This could have proven to be a complicated task of cutting through red tape with the Spain’s Ministry of Culture but I am indebted to the efforts of Senor Antonio Sanchez and Senora Reyez who’s help and guidance made it possible to navigate the extensive archives of Seville under the time constraints of my visit and have a good number of maps and illustrations of early Philippines available online.
