Hemeroteca Vimaranense

In the image of what happens with other lands, the local press of Guimarães has a long tradition, begun in 1822, at the dawn of liberalism, with Azemel Vimaranense.

To this day, they saw daylight more than hundred and fifty periodicals projects, pursuing various objectives and guidelines, provide us with dated testimonies on the vimaranense daily life, the episodes of local history and the way in which we observe Portugal and the World.

Creations of a transient time, moving in the short term, newspapers constitute a significant observatory of the flow of everyday life. However, if its preservation ensures the safeguarding of our collective memory, its ephemeral character raises serious difficulties for its preservation: as objects of immediate consumption, its production obeys more to economic imperatives than to the necessity of resistance to the usury of the time. Printed on low-grade paper, the newspapers raise further conservation difficulties, which explain the disappearance of many of the copies that came out of the press over almost two centuries. With its loss, it was a part of our collective memory that was lost.

Moved by the concerns of safeguarding the patrimony and memory that are part of its founding matrix, the Sociedade Martins Sarmento has gathered throughout its existence a valuable newspaper library, made up of collections of periodicals that, from the first quarter of the nineteenth century to the present day, which were published in Guimarães.

The digitization of these collections is a priority task, taking into account the need to remove the originals in paper of public consultation due to the poor state of conservation of many copies. We began by publishing the collection of the Comércio de Guimarães, since its foundation in 1884, as well as other titles that began its publication in the nineteenth century. You can see the complete list here.

We are carrying out Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in all publications, to allow searching in the text of each journal. However, given the length of the newspaper pages, we have opted to make PDF files available without this possibility. As we progress through this task progressively, we will make the searchable files available.