The first news of the Historical Archive of Girona (AHG) dates back to 1931, when the State Government issued the Decree for the creation of provincial historical archives in each provincial capital with the aim of registering the notarial protocols of more than a hundred years of the districts within its territorial scope. In the case of Girona —except for the timid attempt to create the archive in 1937, in the midst of the war, by the Government of Catalonia (Generalitat de Catalunya), with the adaptation of the Casa Falló in the city as a document concentration deposit—, the AHG did not become a reality until 1952: with the publication of a specific order from the Ministry of Education, the Provincial Historical Archive of Girona was created. The headquarters of the archive, at that time, was the building of the old Capuchin convent, a place that had also housed the Institut d’Ensenyament Mitjà, on Carrer de la Força. In 1963 it moved to the Casa de Cultura, and began to share spaces and services with the Provincial Public Library. It remained there until 1984, when its current headquarters, located in Plaça de Sant Josep, was opened, and it began to occupy what had originally been the convent of the Discalced Carmelites of the city of Girona, built from 1591 onwards.

A few years earlier, specifically in 1981, the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya had assumed management of the centre. On 15 March 1982, an agreement was signed to transfer the management of state-owned archives to the regional administration, which affected the three provincial archives of the country: Girona, Lleida and Tarragona. Since then, the AHG has been a state-owned archive centre, managed by the Generalitat de Catalunya and fulfilling, among many others, the functions of the Gironès Regional Archive.

Commissioned by the Ministry of Culture, in 2009 the construction project for the building that was to house the new headquarters of the AHG was drawn up, located in the Fontajau neighbourhood of the city. This change was to allow a significant increase in the capacity for document storage —now fully occupied—, adaptation to the new demands and technical conditions of current archival work and, ultimately, an improvement in the quality of the service. Currently, the execution of the project is halted.

The collections that the AHG safeguards come from various sources. Particularly important are the documentation of the notarial collections of four districts —Figueres, Girona, La Bisbal d’Empordà and Santa Coloma de Farners— from 1261 to 1919, consisting of 32,000 volumes, and the collection of the Territorial Management of Girona of the Cadastre. Also noteworthy are the collections of the peripheral State Administration, among which the collection of the Civil Government of Girona (1772-2003) stands out, with the important series of “Frontier and Research Files”, and the collections of the various ministerial delegations in the province of Girona. Other remarkable collections are the collection of the Mortgage Accountants (1768-1870), the collection of the Institut Jaume Vicens Vives de Girona (1845-1990) and the remarkable collection of fragments of Hebrew manuscripts extracted from the covers of notarial volumes.