Euskal Echea Asociación Cultural y Beneficencia

Euskal Echea was born in Buenos Aires as the first house meant for the Basques from both sides of the Pyrenees, and it was a long time in the making. Martín Errecaborde, Nemesio de Olariaga and others had been pushing for it since 1898, the first public document of the project came out in April 1900, and the society was not formally founded until 24 April 1904, when a general meeting approved its Statutes and Regulations. It began as a charitable institution for orphans, in 1906 it opened its first school in Buenos Aires, with 100 girls, and it ended up as a school: at its Llavallol site the children of the Basque landowners of the Buenos Aires interior were educated, and Basque was taught there until 1932. After the Spanish Civil War, Basque clergy purged as “nationalists” and posted to that school helped the newly arrived exiles from there. Today it runs two schools, in Llavallol and in the capital, with more than 1,500 pupils and Basque as a curriculum subject, and in 2016 it received the ENE Award from Eusko Ikaskuntza.