Portugal has long been recognized by historians as a treasure house of manuscript collections. In Lisbon alone there are some twenty-five public archives, many of which hold rich collections of historical documents and rare printed works. Other urban centers like Coimbra, Porto, Évora, Braga, Guimarães, and Setúbal, not to mention smaller cities and towns, also have numerous archives, specialized libraries, museums, and ancient monasteries that house important manuscript and printed collections. The archaic Portuguese bureaucracy, however, has rarely been able to adequately assess the extensive contents of such a large number of depositories. Indeed, few of these institutions can boast of possessing catalogs for their holdings. When these do exist, they are more often than not either incomplete or almost totally out of date. As a result the lack of appropriate working tools turns archival research in Portugal into a rather painstaking and time-consuming affair. Instead of a dusty treasure house whose contents have been organized and assessed, what the researcher usually finds is a labyrinth of uncataloged, unknown, and uncared-for musty documents slowly deteriorating in the damp cellars of decrepit buildings.