The Diocese of Nueva Segovia was established together with Cebu and Nueva Cáceres by
Pope Clement VIII on August 14, 1595, by virtue of the
papal bull Super Specula Militantis Ecclesia under the patronage of the Immaculate Conception. Its first bishop was
Miguel de Benavides. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction extended to the provinces of
Ilocos Norte,
Ilocos Sur,
Abra,
La Union,
Pangasinan,
Cagayan,
Isabela,
Nueva Vizcaya,
Batanes,
Mountain Province and five northern towns of
Tarlac. Although
Vigan was the oldest town created by the Spaniards in the north, it was not made the seat of the diocese which was created for Northern Luzon since the preferred locale, Nueva Segovia, a city at the mouth of the
Cagayan River in Cagayan, was by then already a flourishing Spanish settlement while Vigan was then only a pueblo, a town. Eventually however, the city of Nueva Segovia was gradually effaced by the floods of the Rio Grande, and the seat was provisionally transferred to the nearby town of
Lal-lo, Cagayan. On September 7, 1758, the seat was permanently transferred to Vigan, retaining the old name, up to the present. The transfer was made at the request of the bishop Juan de la Fuente Yepes during the pontificate of
Benedict XIV. Nueva Segovia was elevated to an archdiocese, separated from Manila on June 29, 1951, by virtue of the papal bull
Quo in Philippina Republica of
Pope Pius XII. As the other local churches matured, there was eventual weaning from the archdiocese. Presently, it covers the civil province of
Ilocos Sur, with the
Dioceses of Laoag,
Bangued and
Baguio, and the
Vicariate of Bontoc-Lagawe as suffragans. Santiago C. Sancho was the first archbishop of the newly elevated metropolitan church. Since Sancho, there had been five other Ordinaries of Nueva Segovia – Archbishops Juan C. Sison,
Jose Tomas Sanchez,
Orlando Quevedo,
Edmundo Abaya,
Ernesto A. Salgado and currently,
Marlo Peralta who is 37th bishop and 7th archbishop. The archdiocese maintains a complex of mass communications media – an AM radio station, DzNS (963 kHz) founded in 1968; a weekly newspaper,
Timek ti Amianan founded in 1983; and a printing press, the
Imprenta Nueva Segovia founded in 1995. In December 2018, the Nueva Segovia Archdiocesan Archives known as Archivo Nueva Segovia (ANS) was declared a national cultural treasure by the
National Archives of the Philippines becoming one of only three archives, including the National Archives and the
University of Santo Tomas Archives, to be given the distinction. The archives was established in the early 1990s by Archbishop Orlando Quevedo. ==Coat of arms==