Municipal fonds

Initially formed by the records of the old municipality of Santa Maria de Sants, which correspond to the period between 1823 and 1897.  There are 23 boxes containing 46 books, 196 files, 416 single documents, 2 opuscules and 4 booklets.  We highlight the Council's minutes books from 1868 to 1897, which offer a very useful introduction to political events and the lives of the inhabitants of this old municipality through their relations with the City Council.  

We mainly keep documents produced and received by the District Municipal Council offices from 1984 to the present day. We also conserve a small number of records on the Deputy Mayor’s Office and the Municipal Council, although these are residual records because both bodies had few functions.

The files most consulted by members of the public include business activity licences, licences for major and minor works, and urban development projects.

Private fonds

We keep a large variety of private fonds from over 400 entities, 30 commercial and factory businesses and over 130 prominent figures in the local history of the Sants-Montjuïc district. For example, the one from the Orfeó de Sants, a choral society founded in 1899 around a concert by the Orfeó Català at Armonía de Sans in the old town of Sants, contains inauguration manuscripts, music, theatre and dance programmes, as well as a small photographic fonds, a bibliographic fonds and some artificial collections.

One highlight is the Manufacturas Serra-Balet fonds, given the importance of this textile manufacturer to Sants, where it operated from 1900 to 1984. Its business was weaving, bleaching, dying and finishing corduroy, and the fonds of 36 boxes contains information on human resources and the running of the factory.

Another interesting fonds is that of the Cooperativa Agrupació Vidriera, founded in 1932 and active until 1992.

Collections

We keep over 50,000 photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as collections of posters from various parts of the district and artificial collections, such as advertising, raffle tickets and religious prints.

We also have an auxiliary library and a periodicals library which conserves lots of publications published by old and present-day entities and associations from the district’s neighbourhoods.

If you want to find out all the information we have at the Sants-Montjuïc Archives, consult the fonds table.