Chile’s Archivo Nacional

The Archivo Nacional de Chile is a government institution in charge of maintaining custoding and receiving the information that is produced as a result of government acts, from the past as well as the present. From a legal point of view, the Archivo Nacional is dependant of the Direccion de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos that in turn depends on the Ministerio de Educación.

Currently, the Archivo Nacional ha different facilities located along the country. Simplifying the Archivo’s organization, reference will only be made to two of the Archivo’s facilities: the Archivo Historico Nacional and the Archivo Nacional de la Administracion (ARNAD), commonly know as the “Archivo del Siglo XX”.

The Archivo Historico Nacional, located on Miraflores street in dowtown Santiago, is the archive that has custody of archival collections from Chile’s colonial period as well as collections from Chile’s Republican era.

The ARNAD is the archive that holds documents that were brought about during Chile’s Republican Era, although this is not exactly true because this archive also holds records that by law are stored after a certain number of years to remove pressure from government institutions and so they can be at the disposal of it’s users.

From a genealogical point of view, the Archivo Nacional holds one of the most important collections: The Notarial Records Repository. This repository contains public deeds from different towns and cities in Chile from colonial time to the Republican Era.