When faced with environmental changes, plant populations must migrate or adapt to avoid extinction. Thus, elucidating which features may confer adaptive potential is of great interest. In the current climate change context, continuous, long-term experiments tracking adaptive genetic changes are critical. However, these are very rare because of the challenge of maintaining a natural continuous long-term experiment, so inferences about past events are usually based on current patterns of genetic variation. However, these snapshots provide limited information on underlying eco-evolutionary events because multiple processes can generate the same patterns. Plant historical records archived in herbaria offer a perfect alternative to continuous, long-term studies. Genetic data obtained from samples stored in herbaria offer a direct window into past evolutionary events and their evolution until present time. Moreover, such genetic information can be paired with phenotypic traits and ecological data to yield crucial insights regarding how plants respond to changes in their surrounding environment. Our research focuses on genetic changes that have occurred in over 500 individuals collected from native populations of Arabidopsis thaliana during the last 250 years in response to climate changes. Our results indicate that ancient and current samples from the same geographic region are more similar to one another than they are to samples from other geographic regions, regardless of their collection date. Despite this similarity within regions across time, we identified a genetic turnover which we are following up on by exploring changes in allele frequencies associated to adaptations to environmental changes over time.  Finally, our study provides the most comprehensive picture of Arabidopsis thaliana genetic diversity on its native range, including geographic areas that were previously excluded from comprehensive population genetic analyses. This new data indicates that the sub-Saharan populations are well differentiated depending on which mountain or massif they originated in, with fairly low level of admixture. We provide insights and recommendations on how herbaria samples can be used for temporal eco-evolutionary studies that focus on adaptations to environmental changes.