The Rescue of the Documentation from the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino relating to Brazil (1986-2004)

Almost a century has now elapsed, but Oliveira Lima’s judgement still rings true. A substantial part of the documentation that is indispensable for composing Brazilian history in the first centuries of the country’s existence is still to be found in Portuguese archives and, most particularly, at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino (Overseas Historical Archive) in Lisbon. Or, rather, it used to be found there. The dream of many is now becoming a reality, for the documentation relating to São Paulo – including Paraná – is to be made fully available to researchers. Not only indexes, guides or excerpts, but the whole document: microfilmed, reproduced in the form of a CD-Rom and catalogued. To a certain extent, the prophesy of Capistrano de Abreu has come true when he said that it would be “necessary to spend many years there [at the Arquivo Ultramarino] without anything else to do, in order to finish the task.”