Public library and regional archive on Terceira, Azores, housed since 2016 in a contemporary building on Rua do Morrão designed by Inês Lobo Arquitectos. Holds approximately 400,000 books and two million documents, including the parish, notarial, and judicial records of Terceira, São Jorge, and Graciosa, the surviving administrative archives of the Diocese of Angra, and substantial monastic, family, and personal collections.
About This Site
The Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Regional Luís da Silva Ribeiro is the principal documentary institution of the central group of the Azores, located in Angra do Heroísmo on Terceira within the zone inscribed by UNESCO in 1983 as a World Heritage Site. The library and archive together hold approximately 400,000 books and two million documents, distributed across a public library, a children's and youth library, a conservation library with legal deposit, and the regional archive.
The current building on Rua do Morrão was inaugurated on 16 September 2016, designed by the Lisbon practice of Inês Lobo Arquitectos and built on what had been the gardens of the nineteenth-century Palacete Silveira e Paulo. It comprises 9,600 square metres of gross built area across three floors, with a translucent U-glass façade that gives the structure its distinctive appearance within the historic urban fabric. Document storage and conservation occupy a partially submerged lower level, with reading rooms, exhibition spaces, and the children's section above. Total investment in the building reached approximately eighteen million euros over a seven-year construction period.
The archive is the most extensive of the three regional archives of the Azores. Its holdings cover the parish, notarial, and judicial records of the islands of Terceira, São Jorge, and Graciosa, providing the documentary backbone for local and regional history from the late fifteenth century onward. Alongside the civil records sit the surviving archives of the Diocese of Angra, including the Cabido and the Mitra, together with documentation from monasteries and convents, brotherhoods, chapels, and the Misericórdias. The institution also holds family archives, the records of civil and cultural associations, and a number of personal papers donated over the past century.
The library traces its origins to the dissolution of the Portuguese monastic orders in the 1830s, when collections from the suppressed convents were transferred into public custody. A formal public library was established in 1871 through the bequest of roughly 4,000 volumes from the personal library of Francisco Jerónimo da Silva, an Angra-born jurist who died in Lisbon, and was officially inaugurated on 1 December 1876. The combined institution in its modern form was created in the late 1940s and 1950s through the work of the Instituto Histórico da Ilha Terceira, founded in 1944, whose members lobbied for the establishment of a district archive (Decree-Law 36/842 of 20 April 1948) and a district library (Decree-Law 40/745 of 16 April 1956). For the next sixty years the institution was housed in the Palácio Bettencourt, a seventeenth-century baroque palace on Rua da Rosa, which it vacated in September 2016 when the present building opened.
The institution is administered by the Direção Regional da Cultura of the Government of the Azores. Its catalogue is partially digitised and accessible through the Catálogo Coletivo dos Arquivos dos Açores. For research into the early modern history of Terceira, including the period of the Order of Christ presence in the Azores, the succession crisis of 1580 to 1583, and the documented activity of Azorean families with interests across the western Atlantic, it is the primary repository of surviving primary material on the island.
Connection to Oak Island
The Biblioteca Pública e Arquivo Regional Luís da Silva Ribeiro holds the most extensive primary documentary record on Terceira's history, including the parish, notarial, and judicial records from the late 15th century onward and the surviving administrative archives of the Diocese of Angra. In S13E24, Portuguese numismatist Alberto Silva examined the Tornes escudo silver coin recovered from the original Money Pit and authenticated by family record back to the 1849 Truro Company drilling operation. Working from the institution's reference collection, Silva narrowed the coin's striking window to no later than 1371, placed it in the reign of Order of Christ patron King Ferdinand I, and confirmed that fewer than a hundred examples are known worldwide despite a much larger original mintage. The archive's collection on the period of Order of Christ jurisdiction over the Azores makes it the single most important Portuguese repository for the documentary side of the Oak Island corridor case.
Fieldwork Notes
Visited in S13E24 (Overseaing the Dig) by Rick Lagina, Alex Lagina, Peter Fornetti, Doug Crowell, Emiliano Sacchetti, and Corjan Mol. Portuguese numismatist Alberto Silva examined the Pitblado coin in person, narrowed its striking window to no later than 1371, and confirmed the rarity of surviving specimens.
