The mayor of Teguise, Juan Pedro Hernández, accompanied by his councilor for Culture, Oswaldo Betancort, and the director of the Historical Archive of Teguise, María Dolores Rodríguez, among other authorities, presented the digitization project of the center this Thursday. This new service will gradually digitize all the documentation existing in the municipal service so that it can be used by scientists, university students or curious people around the world through the Internet.
With this new service, totally free, citizens will be able to enter the Historical Archive of Teguise, the oldest in the Canary Islands. It was created in 1402, although very little remains from that time, since it suffered a fire at the hands of pirates in 1618, which also massacred the population, leaving half of its inhabitants. Most of the buildings in La Villa were burned.
From that same year, at the end of 1618, the Historical Archive was put back into operation. Currently, it is in the old Casa Perdomo from the 18th century, which is located on Carnicería Street 8, near the Clavijo y Fajardo square.
Documents from the 17th and 18th centuries
The most valuable documentation that the archive has, according to the Councilor for Culture, Oswaldo Betancort, are the documents from the 17th and 18th centuries, mainly the chapter acts (plenary sessions) and the books of fifths (taxes, the fifth part of the cattle, harvest or commerce, that all the residents of the island had to pay to the lords and that generated many controversies). In addition, there are thousands of files that this service has been collecting, thanks to its director and advisor Francisco Hernández.
The Archive preserves most of the history of Lanzarote, and a significant piece of the Canary Islands, since until the mid-19th century, La Villa was the capital of Lanzarote. In this center, images, social stories, books, trade treaties, norms or files that make up the island's past have also been preserved.
All the documentation will be digitized through this special machine that has had a cost of 30,000 euros. The system is a German, zenithal, high-resolution equipment that preserves the manuscripts by capturing the images electronically in JPG and PDF.
"The work is arduous, because many of the papers need specific attention, since even within the same book, the paper batches of the time change or the passage of time affects them in a different way, which means that when reproducing, it is necessary to analyze each paper before digitizing them, a fact that slows down the process," the town hall indicates.
