Arquivo Histórico Municipal de Cascais

Open to the public on the 25th of August, 1987, the Arquivo Histórico Municipal de Cascais (AHMC) aims the collection, organization, care, preservation and dissemination of all papers which are at his custody and that claim to be preserved permanently and that are fundamental to build the past of the Municipality. Therefore in addition to the management of documents produced and received by the Municipality of Cascais in the exercise of his activities, AHMC must still treat all documentation considered relevant to the effect which is received by purchase, donation or deposit, as well as improve the promotion of editions, exhibitions and conferences related to the collections or to the local history.

In Cascaís-Estoril, about 35 minutes from Lisbon, there is a special center dedicated to exiles and refugees who were in residence there in the 1930’s and 1940’s: Espaço Memória dos Exilios, inaugurated in 1999. Not only is there a permanent exhibition, with artifacts and documents, and a photo archive, the Municipal Archives of Cascaís (Arquivo Histórico Municipal) has over 64,000 hotel registration cards of people who were living there under “residência fixa”, awaiting exit visas.

In 2008, based on the X-arq, software that complies with ISAD (G) - International Standard for Archival Description and ISAAR (CPF) - International Standard for Archival Authority Entries of Entities, Individuals and Families – AHMC started a computerized project that led to the creation of the Cascais Digital Historical Archives (AHDC), which can be accessed in http://www.cm-cascais.pt/arquivohistoricodigital. AHDC joined to other important municipal archives like Casa Reynaldo dos Santos/Irene Quilhó dos Santos and Museu da Música Portuguesa – Casa Verdades de Faria. Through this new functionality in constant update were thus accessible by a click, descriptions and digitalization of thousands of documents that can be searched by different levels in our database. AHMC also joined the Municipal Geographical Information System (SIG), to simplify the search for files of private works, that can be accessed by http://sig.cm-cascais.pt by selecting Temas/Cultura/Arquivo Histórico – Processos de obra, and choosing de desired area of the map. In order to improve that tool and share resources, we’ve created an interface SIG/X-arq, which allows geo-tagging of new types of documents from databases providing remote research modalities that respond to identified needs among users.