Official Portal of Tourism. Junta de Castilla y Leon

The primitive fortress of Simancas was built between 1467-1480 by the Enríquez family, admirals of Castile, who ended up ceding it to the Catholic Monarchs in 1490. Since then it was used as a deposit of valuable objects (weapons, money, etc.) and mainly as a prison real maximum security.

Between 1540-1545 Emperor Charles V created, in one of the towers of this castle (since then called the "Archive tower or cube"), the Simancas Archive, intended to guard the most important legal documents for the Castilian Monarchy.

However, the great transformation of the Archive occurred in the second half of the 16th century, during the reign of Felipe II, when all the documentation (not a selection) generated by multiple central organizations of the Hispanic Monarchy began to be collected there: a valuable information resource at the service of power. In order to respond to this growing volume of documents, the extension of the Archive (until then limited to the aforementioned tower) over a large part of the fortress was addressed, in accordance with the project (1578) of the royal architect Juan de Herrera, although this action was not would complete until well into the seventeenth century.

The Simancas Archive was until the 19th century one of the great administrative archives of the Spanish Monarchy. In this century, this center (saturated and incapable of receiving more documentation) was gradually transformed into a historical archive, at the service of information, research and culture. The General Archive of Simancas (under the Ministry of Culture) has held since 2017 the qualification of "Memory of the World" granted by UNESCO.