The aim of the article is to present the use of the Franziscean Cadastre in studying past land use and reconstructing the rural cultural landscape of the 19thcentury. Special attention is devoted to pre-senting the content and accessibility of archival materials. By comparing maps from the Franziscean Cadastre with current land use, we successfully determined the changes, particularly in the rural cultural landscape. A general trend in Slovenia is the selective abandoning of farm land, which has had a great impact on the appearance of the landscape: cultivated fields become meadows, once cultivated areas on less favourable sites are overgrown by forest, and the same occurs with pastures. On the basis of case studies, we estab-lished the great usefulness and value of the Franziscean Cadastre, which still exists for almost the entire territory of today's Slovenia.