The Historical Archive of Social Movements will be based in the old Women’s Prison of Alcalá de Henares

The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun announced this Tuesday that the Historical Archive of Social Movements (AHMS) will have its headquarters in the old Alcalá de Henares Women’s Prison.

After signing an agreement with the rector of the University of Alcalá, Carmelo García, the building, which is currently owned by the university, will once again be property of the State.

The old Women’s Prison, also known as La Galera or the San Cirilo school, has more than 8,000 square meters built, and is located next to the General Administration Archive (AGA), between Santo Tomás, Carmen Descalzo and Luis Gómez el Estudiante streets.

During a visit to the property, Urtasun indicated that “for decades”, this was a space of “confinement, punishment and pain” and added that “there is a very powerful symbolic force in transforming a place of confinement into a place open to citizens.”

“Now we want to turn it into a space of memory, knowledge and democracy. Where there was silence, we want there to be memory; where there was confinement, we want there to be research, public access and democratic culture“he added according to a statement.

For his part, García highlighted that it is “extraordinarily positive news for the University of Alcalá, as well as for the city and for” Spanish society as a whole.

Furthermore, he added that the agreement is also “important” from a heritage and architectural point of view, since it means giving ““a decisive step for La Galera to once again have life, activity and a public function fully in line with its historical relevance.”

The AHMS collection has not stopped growing since its creation in 2021 and this Tuesday it was announced that the historical archive of the Ecologistas en Acción confederation, gathered and guarded for 50 years by this entity, has become part of its funds.

Once the State has effectively recovered ownership of the building, it will be renovated by Culture to adapt it to the needs and uses of an archive, they warn.

The old Women’s Prison has its origins at the end of the 16th century in a school built outside the city walls of Alcalá de Henares.which was demolished in the 19th century to replace a building used as a prison since 1852.

In fact, this was the only women’s prison existing at that time in Spain and it functioned as a prison intermittently for nearly a century, until 1978.