Colombia

The Basque community of Colombia has two moments set far apart from each other. The first is colonial and numerous: there were Basques among the founders of cities such as Medellín, and one historian reckoned that they made up around 20% of the immigration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After independence that presence was almost wiped out. The second moment belongs to the twentieth century and came in batches: first the members of religious orders, then the eighty adults and forty-five children fleeing the Spanish Civil War, and by the sixties some five hundred people, many of them in the metalworking industry. From there comes today’s community: three active centres, two of them in Antioquia, where research into the Basque past is part of the life of the associations themselves.

The first moment begins with the conquest. There were Basques among the founders of cities and in the administration of the New Kingdom of Granada: Pedro de Ursúa, from Navarre, founded Pamplona and was governor of Santa Fe in the mid-sixteenth century, and Miguel de Aguinaga, from Eibar, made the founding of Medellín official in 1675 (see Basques in Colombian history).¹ And they were not few. The historian Juan Friede estimated that the Basques made up around 20% of the immigration of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.³

With independence, the thread was almost cut. In Antioquia, the Basque presence became “almost imperceptible” until the late nineteenth century.⁵

When they came back, it was mostly in religious habit. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jesuits, Carmelites and Passionists recruited Basque members for their communities in Colombia.²⁵

Then came those fleeing the war. Between 1937 and 1939, during the presidencies of Alfonso López Pumarejo and Eduardo Santos, some 80 Basque adults and 45 Basque children arrived in Colombia, according to Auñamendi: teachers, farmers, doctors and small industrialists.² And by the sixties Basque civilian immigration stood, according to the same source, at around 500 people, many of them in the metalworking industry.²