Archives of the Indies

If you’re interested in the Archives of the Indies I want to recommend an excellent book:

Discovering the Americas: Archives of the Indies.

It’s a recent over-sized volume and gives a great overview of the archive itself and its contents, including pictures of original documents, sketches and drawings and actual samples of materials sent from New Spain and other territories, including samples of silk and other fabrics that look brand new, rather than five hundred years old.

I regret that I never made it to the Archives of the Indies in Seville.

I was a royal scholar at the Instituto de Cooperacion Iberoamericano in the Moncloa in Madrid during the summer of 1986, and enjoyed a wealth of acculturation. Every Friday our art professor took us to the nearby Prado Museum where we spent an entire morning experiencing hundreds of masterpieces.

We went on field trips to Toledo where we visited El Transito Synagogue and many other places of interest.

I also got to go to El Escorial. And the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid. And a magnificent Egyptian Temple relocated piece by piece from Egypt ahead of the rising waters of the Aswan High Dam.

But not the Archives of the Indies:(

Even when my sister and I visited Seville for Expo ’92, we somehow missed the archives.