Newspaper
One of the most prestigious documentary sections of The Canary Museum is its rich hemeroteca, whose origin dates back mainly to the collections from the particular archives of Dr. Chil and the Martínez de Escobar brothers, who became part of the library of society from the moment of its foundation.
Since then, the hemeroteca of El Museo Canario has not stopped increasing its funds for a single day, so as early as the 1940s it was necessary to remove it from the central core of the library to facilitate its internal management and its correct treatment as a specialized collection.
The criteria for selecting funds for the hemeroteca are formulated with the aim of forming a collection of heritage character that includes all the periodicals published in the archipelago, to which we must add those edited by Canarian societies or colonies abroad or those that present a special interest for the knowledge of our island reality. Complete the hemeroteca an important collection of national and international scientific journals.
Thus, after 130 years of income, currently the hemeroteca is considered as the most complete of all that exist in the archipelago, and has numerous copies of press or magazines that can only be found on our shelves.
Among the titles that make up the hemeroteca of The Canary Museum we can find the only copy of the famous Canary Islands Post, the first known newspaper of the islands, written by an anonymous author and distributed in 1762 in manuscript copies. To this headthey we must also add the first that was printed on the islands, the Miscellaneous Weekly enciclopédic elementar, dated in La Laguna between 1785 and 1787. From there, a collection that arrives without interruption to the copies of the press that is currently published in the archipelago, going through a stage, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth century, in which the Canary Islands became one of the five Spanish provinces of greatest journalistic production. At this time, the most diverse political trends and opinion groups of all kinds are represented in the press: liberal, republican, conservative, socialist, nationalist, monarchists, traditionalists, Catholics, anti-clerical, anarchists, masonic, satirist, literary, feminine, professional…
In total, about one million copies of publications of all kinds illustrating the plurality of Canarian society and the events, major and minor, of which he witnessed, mainly in the last two centuries.