Seville.- The Ministry of Culture has initiated the procedures for the declaration of inexportability of a document notarized document signed by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) in Seville on July 8, 1593, which is up for sale at an auction this Wednesday in Madrid.
The declaration of non-exportability guarantees as a precautionary measure that the document cannot leave the country and promotes its protection as part of the Spanish historical and cultural heritage, as pointed out by the Ministry of Culture in a press release.
The historical, archival, and heritage interest of this document justifies this declaration, which also responds to the request for it made by the Junta de Andalucía.
This cultural heritage protection tool can be adopted by the Ministry of Culture “when circumstances advise it” and until the competent regional Administration initiates the procedures to include it in one of the protection categories provided for in its regulations, they have specified from the central Government.
The beginning of that definitive protection file will correspond to the autonomous community in which the document is finally located after the auction that will take place this Wednesday and in which it will be put up for sale.
The document comes from the notarial records of 1593 of the notary Luis de Porras, which are currently held in the Provincial Historical Archive of Seville, where all the historical notarial protocols of the city’s notaries are deposited.
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The document was apparently torn from its original book in the 19th century, “although there is no certainty as to the exact date on which this event could have occurred”.
Judicial Procedure
Of great historical and documentary value for experts, even though it is not a handwritten letter by the author of ‘Don Quixote’, this document was the subject of legal proceedings in 1998 after appearing at an auction in Barcelona, with the Junta de Andalucía claiming its public ownership as the managing administration of the Provincial Historical Archive of Seville.
As detailed by the Board in a press release, the identification defended at the time was not based exclusively on the content of the document or on Cervantes’ signature, but also on various archival and diplomatic elements, including the existence of a matching entry in the notarial index.
A ruling issued by the Provincial Court of Palma de Mallorca in 2007 exhausted the judicial route to claim the restitution of the notarial protocol to the Historical Archive of Seville.
Faced with the impossibility of recovering the asset in court, the Andalusian Ministry of Culture requested the prohibition of the cited document’s departure from Spain, considering “its historical and documentary interest and the singular patrimonial relevance derived from the concurrent archival and judicial precedents”.
The Durán Arte y Subastas auction house in Madrid will auction this letter, 31.4 x 20 centimeters, made of watermarked paper written on both sides and with a “very small corrosion of the paper due to the ink, which does not affect the reading.” EFE
