Ecuador

Ecuador has no Basque centre in the Basque Government’s official register, and there is no record of a Basque emigration that could have sustained one.⁶ What there is instead is a presence made of individual lives: a delegation of the exile that barely got going, missionaries who spent decades in the country and a stained-glass artist who left his work in three cathedrals.

The delegation existed above all on paper. In October 1940 the Consejo Nacional de Euzkadi (Basque National Council) in London planned a local delegation in Ecuador, which would report to the general delegation in Venezuela. Almost nothing is known about who made it up or what it did. At the end of 1941 lehendakari (president of the Basque Government) Aguirre acknowledged that it was not especially active, though he thought that “in due course” it might be of service, and in 1947 José Luis Ibarra appears as delegate.¹

The other two lives begin in the mid-fifties and lasted for decades. The Capuchin friar Alejandro Labaka, from Gipuzkoa, arrived in 1954 and worked in Ecuador until his death in 1987 (see Basques in Ecuadorian history).²³ A year later, in 1955, the stained-glass artist Guillermo Larrazábal, trained in Bizkaia, settled in Cuenca, and he worked on the cathedrals of Cuenca, Ambato and Guayaquil.⁴⁵

More recent is the tie between two towns that share a name. In December 2005 two artists from Ibarra (Ecuador) visited Ibarra (Gipuzkoa) and were received at the Basque Parliament, in a twinning ceremony between the two towns.⁷