Basque Club Of Utah

The Basque Club of Utah was born in 1973 to take over from Salt Lake City's Hogar Hotel, the Basque boardinghouse that for decades gathered the Basques of Utah. It had been opened in 1927 by John and Claudia Landa, emigrants from Bizkaia whom the community remembers as “the grandparents”, and it also served as a restaurant and a cultural centre. When the hotel closed, in the early seventies, Rose Camara Hoover and Robert Ithurralde got the club going, and it held its first annual picnic in 1974 in Saratoga (Utah County). Its dance group, Utah'ko Triskalariak, often travels to Basque festivals all over the country. In 2016 one of its members, Bryan Osoro, born in Salt Lake City and with roots in Ispaster and Ajangiz, climbed Everest with an ikurriña his father had given him, and so completed his personal challenge of the seven summits.