The ‘Biblioteca Histórica’ consists of the texts that were moved to the building Madrid to house the ‘Escuela de Ingenieros de Minas’ in 1894. The 7000 texts contained in this library date from between the 16th century and approximately 1830.
The history of this collection is closely linked to the teaching of mining in Spain, which was officially started in 1777 on behalf of King Carlos III of Spain, by Don Cristóbal Storr, director of the ‘Academia de Minas’ in Almadén, thus creating the fourth School of the specialty, after those of Freiberg, Schemnitz and St. Petersburg, one year before the mining school of Paris.
Until 1821, the school was located in a different building, until it was moved and permanently installed in the current building, located at 21 Calle Ríos Rosas, Madrid.
The library of this new and advanced mining school, in Madrid, consists of works that reflect not only the engineering and technical state of the art at the time, but also a true legacy of all the sciences existing at that time. Of these works, more than a thousand were published in the sixteenth, seventeenth and especially in the eighteenth century, the period now known as the Enlightenment.
There is little concrete data on the provenance of a lot of the works, although the existence of important legacies is known, such as those from Mr. Gómez-Pardo and Mr. Peñuelas.
However, as in any historic library like this one, it is to be assumed that the first professors at the School. such as Elhuyar, Lidner, Andrés del Río, Garza, Larrañaga, Ezquerra, and Baranda etc. would have been in charge of contributing the texts, on which they based their investigations and their teachings. Many of them were from the Freiberg school, which is why there are a remarkable number of works in German.
