The proposal for the archives of the first circumnavigation was put forward jointly by Spain and Portugal. Photo: Shutterstock/gaceta.es.
Archives documenting the first voyage around the world (1519-22) were inscribed on the UNESCO World Memory List this Wednesday along with 63 other documentary collections from around the world.
With this announcement, which reactivates registrations after a six-year hiatus, 494 collections are now included in this register, created in 1992 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco).
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🔴BREAKING🔴
64 new nominations registered with UNESCO #MemoryOfTheWorld To.
These documents, archives and historical treasures represent the richness and diversity of our common humanity. https://t.co/JciMPxTRdI #SharingHumanity pic.twitter.com/zDkOB0CQSn
— UNESCO 🏛️ #education #science #culture 🇺🇳 (@UNESCO) May 24, 2023
“Documentary heritage is the common memory of mankind. It should be protected for research purposes and shared with as many people as possible. “It’s a fundamental part of our collective history,” the organization’s director-general, Audrey Azoulay, said in a statement.
Proposed jointly by Spain and Portugal as a milestone in human history, the proposal for the archives of the first circumnavigation voyage documents the preparations for the voyage, the Spanish-Portuguese collaboration and the testimonies of the discoveries made, ending with proving that the earth was round and is mostly covered by water.
Posters from Cuba and archives from Peru and Uruguay
Cuba received two inscriptions, the first of which is the Archive of the Acts of the Havana City Council during the colonial period (1550-1898), contained in 273 books.
The second is a collection of posters of Cuban films, from the first ones kept in the Cinemateca de Cuba, such as “La Manigua” or “La Mujer Cubana” from 1915, to contemporary films.
Unesco inscribes pieces of Cuban cultural heritage in the International Register of World Memories
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Peru was inscribed in the Courret Collection, which comprises 30,693 glass photographic plates from the Courret Photographic Studio and offers a glimpse of Peruvian society life in Lima in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
There is also the photo archive of the newspaper El Popular, the official organ of the Uruguayan Communist Party. The newspaper’s headquarters was attacked and shut down by the military dictatorship and its hidden files.
Found 33 years later, they comprise around 50,000 negatives, of which 37,400 have been cataloged so far, and offer a glimpse into the diverse societal challenges the country faced then and now.
Other funds taken up by Unesco include the documentary collection of the Nazi massacres in Babi Yar (outskirts of Kiev), in which more than 100,000 people were murdered, mostly Jews, but also Gypsies and members of other minorities.
Also presented will be the Holocaust film “Shoah” (1985) by Claude Lanzmann and its two hundred hours of archive material, presented by France and Germany.
The archives of the Swiss writer Johanna Spyri (1827-1901), who is known as the author of the Heidi series of children’s novels, were also included.
Published between 1880 and 1881, the stories about the alpine girl Heidi, her grandfather, her friends Pedro and Clara and the implacable Miss Rottenmeier are still iconic in Switzerland today, where there is even an open-air museum in the town of Maienfeld.
Efe/OnCuba.