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HISTORICAL INFORMATION

Girona Provincial Council was founded in 1836, existing briefly between 1822 and 1823. The previous existence of the Trienni Liberal (Liberal Triennium) demonstrates that there was an archive belonging to the corporation, which from the very beginning was autonomous in nature, since there are documents proving that it accompanied members of the Government of Girona when they escaped to Barcelona in April 1823, pushed by the offensive of the absolutist troops, and it was deposited in the secretary’s office of the Barcelona Provincial Government, which officially returned it in 1988.

Since 1837 the Archive of Girona Provincial Council has been housed in the facilities of the Provincial Council and the Civil Government, in the old convent of the Calced Carmelites in Girona. The first known archivist was José María Esteban de Maza, who took charge of the archive in 1822.

During the 1920s the provincial archivist, Juan Bautista Torroella, made a significant effort to describe all the records housed in the General Archive, classifying them into the following sections: Acts, Official Gazettes and Journals, Charity and Health, General and Administration, Provincial Accounting, Elections and the Census, Miscellaneous, Military call-ups and replacements, and Forms.

Throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries the General Archive of Girona Provincial Council received documentation from the Provincial Council itself, the Civil Government, the Boards of Health, Charity, Agriculture, Industry and Commerce, as well as the mediaeval and modern records from health and charity establishments (Santa Caterina Hospital and the Hospice of Our Lady of Mercy) which later became services offered by the Provincial Council as a result of the Charity Law of 1849.

During the period of the 2^nd Republic and the Spanish Civil War, Catalan provincial governments were abolished and their competencies were assigned to the Government of Catalonia, which established a Delegate Commissariat that continued to take care of the Provincial Archive. During this short period of time an inventory was prepared, which consisted of two volumes of the records belonging to the provincial corporation and other records deposited in the General Archive of Girona Provincial Council.

Once the Delegate Commissariat of the Government of Catalonia in Girona had closed down and the Provincial Council was restored in 1939, two priests, Noguer and Moreno, reclassified the records of the General Archive of Girona Provincial Council into a series of handwritten catalogue cards. The work commenced in 1943, and from 1969 onwards, Dr Jaume Marquès Casanovas continued the task of preparing the catalogue of the Archive.

With the reestablishment of democracy, and after 1985, Girona Provincial Council changed its archive policy and started modernising the General Archive, with the main aim of setting up appropriate facilities and establishing an archive and document management system that would foster the smooth running of the administration itself and enable citizens to access the documents and information.