Torre do Tombo National Archive Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo (ANTT)

Overview

The Torre do Tombo National Archive (Portuguese: Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo; ANTT) is Portugal's national archive and one of the oldest archival institutions in the world. Located in Lisbon, it is administered under the Direção-Geral do Livro, dos Arquivos e das Bibliotecas (DGLAB), a central service of the Ministry of Culture. It holds more than twelve centuries of documentary history, from the ninth century to the present day.

History and Founding

The first known documentary reference to the archive dates to 1378, during the reign of King Fernando I, when it was installed in one of the towers of São Jorge Castle in Lisbon. The archive's name derives from this original location: the "Tower of the Tome" (Torre do Tombo). It served as the repository for royal administrative records, decrees, and documents governing the kingdom and its overseas territories. In the aftermath of the devastating 1755 Lisbon earthquake, the archive's keeper Manuel da Maia personally organized the rescue of approximately 90,000 documents and arranged for their temporary housing, eventually securing a new location at the Convent of São Bento (today the Portuguese Parliament). Following a public tender in 1982, construction of a purpose-built archive building began; it was inaugurated in 1990 at its current site in the university campus area of Lisbon.

Collections and Holdings

The archive's shelving extends approximately 140 kilometers. Among its most significant holdings are the Corpo Cronológico (Chronological Corpus), a collection of 83,000 manuscripts documenting the Portuguese Age of Discoveries, inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2007; the Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha, the first document describing Brazil, inscribed on the Memory of the World Register in 2005; and an original copy of the Treaty of Tordesillas. Other notable holdings include more than 36,000 cases from the Court of the Holy Office (Inquisition), the archive of the political police (PIDE/DGS) under the Salazar and Caetano dictatorships, illuminated Leitura Nova codices from the sixteenth century, and parish registers dating back several centuries.

Notable Materials Related to Journalism and Media

The archive holds the PIDE/DGS political police archive, which contains surveillance files on journalists, publishers, and dissident writers during the Estado Novo period (1933–1974), making it an essential resource for research into press censorship and the suppression of independent media in twentieth-century Portugal.

Access and Usage

The reading rooms are open Monday through Friday, 10:00–18:00. Access requires only a single piece of formal identification. Document and microfilm requests, as well as digitization orders, are transacted online through the ANTT catalogue portal. Significant portions of the catalogue and many digitized documents are freely accessible online.