Annals of the Municipality

The ministerial order (portaria) of 8 November 1848 required the Municipal Councils to keep a book entitled ‘Annals of the Municipality’ (Anais do Município) and to have entered in it, in the month of March each year, a summary of all the events, notes and information that might be of interest to the history of the municipality concerned. The illustrious civil governor of this archipelago, José Silvestre Ribeiro, who never neglected any matter that might contribute to the material and intellectual progress of the people under his administration, called for compliance with that order in his circulars to the councils and to the municipal administrators (administradores do concelho) of the district, dated 3 January 1848 and 22 January 1850. In them he set out, with the most persuasive arguments, the advantages and the necessity of carrying out that government measure. Few municipal councils, starting with that of the district capital, complied with so useful and necessary a directive.

We know only that the councils of Porto Santo, Machico and Calheta compiled their annals, although in the following years they failed to continue them. They thus did not comply with the law in full, and so made their compliance almost entirely useless.

On Porto Santo it was the municipal administrator (administrador do concelho, the government's representative), João de Sant'Ana e Vasconcelos, who in 1848 gathered the necessary notes and gave the annals of that municipality (concelho) their final form. It is a valuable work and may be regarded as an interesting monograph on the island of Porto Santo (‘holy harbour’), both from the historical point of view and for its description of the island and its statistics of produce, population, customs, etc. Despite its shortcomings, it is a work that does great honour to its author's memory. It was published in full in the Heraldo da Madeira (‘Madeira Herald’) in January, February and March 1906, and some passages had already appeared long before in the Diário de Notícias of this city.

Less complete, but also interesting and containing valuable material for the history of the municipality, are the annals of Machico. They seem to us to have been written by José António de Almada, a native of that town (vila), who was clerk (escrivão) of the court of law in the judicial district (comarca) of Funchal. They remained unpublished until 1906, when, in November, they were published in full in the Heraldo da Madeira. Mention must also be made of the annals of the municipality of Calheta (‘small cove’), which remain unpublished and contain some valuable material for the history of that municipality.

The Funchal Council entrusted the writing of its annals first to Marceliano Ribeiro de Mendonça, then to Francisco de Andrade and finally to Augusto César Barjona de Freitas. The second refused to write them, while the first and third did nothing, although there is no record that they had declined to perform the task.

At its meeting of 7 October 1897 the Council approved a proposal by its president that the municipal archive should keep a book recording in detail the history of all the major works, resolutions and improvements carried out by the Municipality. This decision, however, was never put into effect, for reasons unknown to us. The book intended for the annals ordered by Councillor (conselheiro, honorary title of the royal council) Silvestre Ribeiro still exists today in the Municipal Archive, completely blank.