Ramon Alberch: "The most important documents in Barcelona were kept in boxes with three locks, each in the hands of a different person."

BarcelonaRamon Alberch (Girona, 1951) is a historian and archivist. He has been director of the Girona Municipal Archive, archivist in Barcelona, ​​director of the Barcelona Municipal Institute of History, and deputy director general of Archives for the Generalitat of Catalonia, where he negotiated the return of the Salamanca papersHe is also one of the co-founders and the first president of the Association of Archivists of Catalonia. Internationally, he chaired the Municipal Archives Section of the International Council on Archives (2000-2004) and was the driving force and first president of the NGO Archivists Without Borders. He has now published We create archives, we build citiesA history of the Barcelona Municipal Archive from 1249 to the present day. We talk about cats and rats, papers and power, Barcelona and Catalonia.

We are a country of papers. What is the archival wealth of Barcelona and Catalonia?

— Since the Late Middle Ages, there has been a concern for preserving the most essential documents, primarily for reasons of legal certainty, many of which are on parchment dating back to the 8th and 9th centuries. In the case of town councils, this served to demonstrate the exercise of their powers, especially when these powers derived from privileges granted by kings, thus providing irrefutable proof of their authority. Municipal, Generalitat (Catalan government), and ecclesiastical archives have created an extraordinary volume of highly continuous documentation. As Pere Puig has studied, if we quantify the number of parchments, it is difficult to find as many and as old anywhere in the world as in Catalonia. In Europe, the other countries with such an ancient and extensive heritage are likely France, Italy, and Germany. In the case of Barcelona, ​​it was with James I that municipal autonomy, and with it the archive, truly began in 1249, although there were earlier forms of governance.

Then comes a continuity of centuries.

— Little by little, the city grew and assumed new responsibilities, often with successive privileges granted by the king. And it accumulated documents. Any event in Barcelona's history you might want to learn about is reflected in the municipal archive, which is a mirror of the city's past: from minor everyday occurrences to major events, such as the creation of Cerdà's Eixample district, the Universal Expositions of 1888 and 1929, and the Olympic Games.

Are there gaps? Have documents been destroyed?

More than intentional destruction, fires, or the danger of rats, there have been periods of neglect or abandonment. The 18th century is a clear case of neglect by the Bourbon regime during a time of diminishing the city's powers. The archive bore witness to the city's strength and power, something that was not well-received. The position of chief archivist was abolished and replaced by city councilors on a monthly rotation. This lasted from 1718 until the Liberal Triennium in 1820, when the archive's management began to be rectified. The punishment meted out to the city was also meted out to the archive.

You mentioned rats. The other side of the coin was cats.

— Yes. Historically, archivists tended to live in the archive itself. This allowed them to take better care of it. It was a common practice in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. There is a document from 1387 requesting permission to keep a group of cats to drive away rats, which were the archive's greatest enemy, just as had been done during the time of Juan Agustín (1359-1383).

For centuries, the central and professional figure was that of the jurist-notary-archivist: three in one.

— This figure became established throughout the Middle Ages and well into the 19th century. They were liberal professionals who joined the administration as experts. Their perspective was legal and administrative. One of the most prominent, particularly in the 16th and 17th centuries, was Esteve Gilabert Bruniquer (1561-1641), whose rubrics or documentary indexes are a veritable compilation of the city's history.

These archivists created the so-called 'Green Book' and 'Red Book', two gems.

— The most important documents, often those containing royal charters granting privileges to the city, were kept in three-locked boxes. Three people were needed to open them, each with a different key. Typically, one key belonged to the nobility and clergy, another to the bourgeoisie, and the third to the artisans. To open the box, all three had to be present at the same time. For a time, the boxes were kept in the Convent of Santa Caterina, but a clash between the councilors and the Dominicans over an Inquisition-related matter led to the transfer of the privileges to the Convent of the Fraternities, the Franciscans. These boxes contained the original parchment copies of the major founding documents. However, since these documents needed to be consulted daily, notarized copies were made, known as the books of privileges: the Green Book (four volumes, from the 13th to the 17th centuries) and the Red Book (four more volumes, from the 13th to the 16th centuries). Cities such as Girona or Manresa, among others, also adopted this practice.

And then there's the Exchange Desk and its archive.

— It was a credit and deposit institution—a public bank—that operated from 1401 until its abolition in 1867, when modern banking emerged. The Mesa employed several archivists who prepared documents for controlling expenses, income, currency exchange, loans, and so on. However, during Espartero's bombardment of the city on December 3, 1842, a bomb fell on the Saló de Cent and, as a result, struck the Mesa's archives, destroying a significant portion. It had become more powerful than the municipal archives themselves.

During the 18th century, despite Bourbon oppression, the city economically recovered and grew from 30,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. In the intellectual sphere, despite the prohibition of the university, the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres allowed for a certain continuity, didn't it?

— Indeed, the Royal Academy of Belles Lettres (1729) brought together a group of intellectuals dedicated to the study of language, literature, and history. They championed the modern ideals of historical criticism, in keeping with Enlightenment thought. They understood that archives, beyond research, served, for example, to expose ancient myths and legends that did not correspond to reality. Around 1779, Jaume Caresmar was asked for an opinion on Saint Eulalia, and when he rejected her martyrdom with documentary evidence, the Cathedral Chapter launched a smear campaign against him and expelled him from the cathedral archives.

How was the archive recovered in the 19th century?

— It was necessary to wait for the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823). Everything had to be reorganized. Archival practices shifted from a focus on legal certainty, information management, and administrative documents to one that also embraced the archive as a laboratory for history, scholarship, and knowledge of the past. The return of absolutism brought this process to a standstill, but the reforms of 1834 and 1848 allowed for the proper reorganization of the documents. On a negative note, it should be pointed out that the founding documents, which had been kept in the Convent of San Francisco and later in the Convent of San Juan de Jerusalén, were transferred to the Archive of the Crown of Aragon (ACA) in accordance with the confiscation laws, where they remain today.

In the reality of Catalan archival heritage, the ownership of the ACA has never been resolved.

— As documented by Ramon Planes, approximately 70% of the collection is Catalan, primarily from the Royal Archive of Barcelona. In the 18th century, it was given its current name with the intention of transferring the holdings from Aragon, Valencia, and the Balearic Islands to Barcelona. This transfer never took place, but the name stuck.

The Royal Archives of Valencia are located in Valencia, and the Archives of the Balearic Islands are in Palma. The Archives of Aragon burned down in the 19th century during the Napoleonic invasion.

— Since the majority of the staff is Catalan, the Catalan government has always maintained that the majority of the board members should be Catalan. Subsequent governments have never agreed. And state ownership has remained: the Catalan Water Agency (ACA) has become the only state-run facility in Catalonia. Lately, the issue isn't even being raised anymore.

The 20th century, with two dictatorships and a civil war, was not easy either.

— In the first half of the century, the figure of Agustí Duran Sanpere was crucial. Starting in 1917, he created the historical archive, which opened in 1924 in the Casa del Ardiaca, an emblematic building. While it's true that he neglected the administrative documentation, thanks to him, a great deal of work was done in preserving and compiling records from outside the municipal system, particularly those belonging to citizens and guilds. His efforts during the Civil War alone, as head of the Archives Section of the Generalitat, to save Catalan archives from both uncontrolled anarchists and fascist aircraft, were extraordinary. He deserves all honors now that we commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death.

What are the challenges and dangers facing archives today?

— Neither rats nor fires, and to a lesser extent fungi, are the real threats anymore. Now the issue is the ongoing investment required to maintain digital storage media and overcome technological obsolescence. This involves migrating and converting formats so that documentation retains its attributes of authenticity, integrity, and reliability, despite all the technological changes that occur. Digitization has made document access much more accessible and transparent, but it requires sustained financial investment that political and managerial bodies don't always clearly understand. In the future, integrated institutional platforms for managing digital archives will have to be created to support all the technological challenges. Small municipalities will not have the capacity to keep up with the investment pace and have the appropriate expert professionals. With paper documents, the neglect could be reversed to some extent. With digital documents, if you don't do what needs to be done now, everything will be lost in just a few years.

Are we doing well in Catalonia? Will we continue to be a country rich in documentation?

— We recently hosted the International Congress on Archives in Barcelona this October 2025, thanks to the strength and prestige of Catalan archival science. We have many professionals who are influential globally, and we have excellent facilities. There is a high level of university training and archival awareness at the administrative level, understood as a key element of efficiency and public service. Perhaps now we should also re-emphasize a more historical perspective, focusing on researching and disseminating documentary collections.

With figures like Trump, in a climate of global weakening of the public sector, are the archives at risk?

— Today, what is at risk is the truth. And archives are a guarantor of the truth. At the Barcelona congress, it became clear that one of the two or three issues of concern is memory, how to preserve it. Faced with these individuals who distort and spread lies, archives and libraries must be documentary bastions, pillars of truth. Archives and libraries must be trusted institutions in a post-truth world. fake news.

What other issues are of concern?

— For example, how will archives reflect the diversity of information that exists in society? Today, if an archive wants to be a mirror of society, it must include the many documents produced outside of power, outside of administration: associations, individuals and citizens, media outlets, social networks, and so on. This is the idea of the social archive: heritage, information, truth, knowledge. Life must be reflected in archives. There are things that, if we don't preserve them, will disappear. Pasqual Maragall once told me, "The archive is the city's ID." And he was absolutely right.

Will all the 'Salamanca papers' ever return?

— The most substantial part came in 2005, during Mieres's tenure as regional minister, with Maragall and Zapatero as presidents. Now there's little left to recover: documentation from some private entities and individuals. And, it must be said, we have won all the lawsuits brought against us by the Castile and León regional government, thanks in large part to the support of the Dignity Commission.

How did you and others create the NGO Archivists Without Borders in Barcelona in 1998?

— Maragall's administration had created District 11 to assist Sarajevo during and after the Balkan War. However, with the change in municipal government, the project was discontinued, and to continue the work, we, from the field of archives, created the association. We did pioneering work on a topic that is now of extraordinary importance: the use of archives for the cause of human rights, for achieving truth, justice, reparation, and restoring the memory and dignity of victims. I have the honor of having been, from 2015 to 2021, a member of the National Center for Historical Memory of Colombia and of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, an international criminal tribunal based in Colombia to judge crimes against humanity committed by both the army and the FARC, and to contribute to the ARC's work.