Belgium

The Basque community of Belgium was born of the Spanish Civil War, and its first members were children: the nearly five thousand who were evacuated in 1937 and who, unlike those who went to the United Kingdom, did not live in colonies but were spread among Belgian homes. More than a thousand stayed for good, and part of today’s community descends from them. To that root were later added the Basque professionals drawn to Brussels as the capital of Europe, and the two layers come together today in the city’s Basque centre: one of its founding members is the son of a girl from Donostia-San Sebastián who was sent to Belgium in 1937.

The children were the first to arrive. Belgium was the second destination of the evacuation of children during the Spanish Civil War, after France (see the children taken in by families).² Behind them, in July 1937, the Basque Government opened a Delegation in Brussels, which, with the break caused by the German occupation, lasted until 1980 (see the Basque Government in Brussels).³

When the war was over, not all the children went back: more than a thousand settled in Belgium permanently.²

The Basque presence today also has an institutional side, which began to take shape in the eighties. The public company SPRI already had an office in Brussels in 1986; Decree 89/1988 created the Basque Government Office in the city, and on 6 February 1996 the present premises of the Delegation were opened. Since Decree 175/2011 it has been called the Delegation of the Basque Country to the European Union.⁷ In 2010 the Basque community of Belgium also founded its own centre, the Bruselako Euskal Etxea (see the Basque community today).⁴¹