An artwork

The bases for a historical archive in the Gràcia neighbourhood began to be laid in 1983, following a number of District Municipal Council initiatives. Meanwhile but independently of that, the Club Excursionista de Gràcia, a local hiking club, had been compiling a large number of historical Gràcia documents since 1927 that formed what was known as the Gràcia Archives.

So, around the Barcelona City Council Archives Organisation Project, the Gràcia District Municipal Archives was set up in 1988 and was subsequently located in different places. The first was a small space at the District Municipal Council headquarters in Plaça de Rius i Taulet (today Plaça de la Vila de Gràcia).

Then, in 1991, they were moved to a single-storey “town house” and garden built in the early years of the 20th century on Carrer de les Camèlies, which had been remodelled and adapted to the needs of an archive centre. However, given the limitations of the existing space and the growth of the fonds, a decision was eventually taken to move the archives to the emblematic Jaume Fuster Library building, designed by the architect Josep Antoni Llinàs i Carmona and inaugurated on 13 November 2005. This work won the Foment de les Arts Decoratives (FAD) Award for Architecture in 2006.