The Municipal Archive of Barbastro opens a window to centuries of history in the new issue of Documents and Archives of Aragon (DARA) – News, the magazine promoted by the Government of Aragon to disseminate the documentary heritage of the community. The publication dedicates its entire 24th edition, corresponding to June 2026, to one of the most important documentary collections in the province of Huesca due to the age of the documents it preserves and the continuity of a documentation that is maintained, practically without gaps, from the medieval origins of the municipality to the present day.
Published jointly by the Government of Aragon and the City Council of Barbastro, this monographic issue invites you to discover the documentary wealth that the archive treasures and its role in understanding the evolution of the capital of Somontano over the centuries. The journal focuses on both the conservation of this heritage and its value for research and public knowledge.
A KEY ARCHIVE TO KNOW THE HISTORY OF BARBASTRO
The magazine Documentos y Archivos de Aragón (DARA)-Novedades was born in 2010 as a means of disseminating news and information related to the archives of the autonomous community and their research and public knowledge. Throughout its different issues it has addressed topics such as the representation of women in the archives, the documentary heritage of Alto Gállego, the Regional Archives of Aragon or the figure of the Count of Aranda in the Aragonese archives.
The issue that has just been published is dedicated monographically to the Municipal Archive of Barbastro, considered one of the most significant documentary collections in the province of Huesca due to the antiquity of the diplomas and documents it safeguards and, especially, for the continuity of the documentation it gathers, preserved practically without gaps from the medieval origins of the municipality to the present day.
In view of these circumstances, this archive is a piece as fundamental as it is unavoidable to study the past, become aware of the present and intuit the future of the dynamic city of Vero.
In the presentation of the volume, the mayor of Barbastro, Fernando Torres, indicates that «from the historical parchments that narrate our medieval origins and attest to the royal privileges granted to the city, to the contemporary administrative documents that record the daily growth of our community, this space keeps the DNA of who we were, what we are and what we aspire to be».
A DOZEN AUTHORS ANALYSE THE RICHNESS OF THE ARCHIVE
The bulletin brings together articles by Laura Fontova, current municipal archivist of Barbastro; Jesús Paraíso; Professor Juan Carlos Ferré; History scholar Alfonso Ordín; researchers Luis Alfonso Arcarazo and María Pilar Lorén, and antiquarian Toni Buil.
All of them address the trajectory of the Archive through the centuries, the documentary collections that make it up, the vicissitudes of its conservation and organization, the role of the archive for the study of education and the Civil War in the city, the experience of the construction of stories from documentation and the reflection in it of ordinary people, anonymous lives.
