Teguise seals an agreement with the General Archive of the Indies to disseminate historical documents

The mayor of Teguise, Oswaldo Betancort, and the general director of Fine Arts and Cultural Assets and Archives and Libraries, Miguel Ángel Recio, have signed an agreement that establishes collaboration between both parties for the selection and digital reproduction of documents kept in the General Archive of the Indies, for publication and dissemination on a website of the Municipal Archive of Teguise.

This agreement was sealed a few days ago with the mayor's visit to the Archive of the Indies in Seville, accompanied by the Official Chronicler of Teguise, Francisco Hérnandez, and the Director of the Teguise Archive, María Dolores Armas, who were received by the Director of the General Archive of the Indies, Manuel Ravina, who expressed his great pleasure in signing a collaboration that, the Consistory highlights, "will rescue a very valuable part of the written history of Teguise as the former capital of Lanzarote", which in 2018 will celebrate its 600th anniversary.

"It is very important for Teguise to have the material and the necessary tools to disseminate knowledge of our history and put them at the service of society and citizens," declared Oswaldo Betancort. "Furthermore, it represents a further step in positioning Teguise and Lanzarote at a heritage and cultural level, as we have proposed since the previous legislature, in which we began to recover signs of identity with projects such as the small open-air museum that is today the network of sculptures in honor of our customs and traditions," added the mayor.

For his part, the chronicler of Teguise, Francisco Hernández, took the opportunity to donate to the Historical Provincial Archive of Granada 85 files dated between the years 1510 and 1735 on the sale of various lands and farmhouses, some of them made by the Moors to the residents of Granada. "We have been told that the document from 1510 is one of the oldest in the archive," says Hernández, who found these files through one of his brothers when he was browsing in an antique store.

In 1618 all documents about Lanzarote were burned

The written documents that existed about Lanzarote largely disappeared in 1618. The last and most terrible invasion suffered by the island of Lanzarote not only had repercussions among the local population, in which nearly 900 people were captured, but also on the cultural heritage of Lanzarote. It was May 1, 1618 when a squadron of 28 Algerian ships under the command of Admiral Tabac Arráez was to carry out the worst of the Berber pirate attacks on Lanzarote. Although the objective of the corsairs was the looting and capture of the inhabitants of the island to sell them as captives, the more than 5,000 soldiers who landed on the island also did not hesitate to raze and destroy everything they found in their path.

One of the buildings that did not go unnoticed by the Algerians was the palace of the Marquis Agustín de Herrera y Rojas. "They set it on fire and practically all the historical documents that existed about Lanzarote were burned," says the chronicler of Teguise, Francisco Hernández. And it is that the Marquisate of Herrera possessed the manor of Lanzarote, which allowed them to treasure the most valuable documents that existed on the island.