Philippines

Long after the conquistadors, the Basque mark on the Philippines was that of ships and trade: captains and pilots, trading houses with Basque surnames and a bridge that ended up as a symbol of Manila.

According to Estornés Lasa, it was in shipping that the Basques stood out most: the Auñamendi entry maintains that more than 90% of the captains and pilots on the Manila routes were Basque.² Among the merchants he mentions José Oyanguren, from Bergara, who arrived in 1825 and from 1847 drove the development of the Davao region, and José Joaquín Inchausti, from Zumarraga, founder of the house of Inchausti y Compañía, as well as the Zubiri, Matía, Menchacatorre, Aldecoa and Gorostiza families.²

The house of Ynchausti y Compañía left Manila a work that became a symbol of the city, the Puente Colgante, the suspension bridge over the Pasig River. To design it they chose a Basque engineer who had already built suspension bridges in Euskal Herria, whom euskalkultura.eus calls Matías Mechacatorre (Auñamendi mentions the surname Menchacatorre among the Basque merchants of Manila). It went up between 1849 and 1852, measured 110 metres long by 7 wide and was the first steel suspension bridge in Asia. At first it was called the Puente de Clavería, after the governor general of the day. The company obtained a ninety-year concession to operate it, and the tolls were one of its first sources of income. The bridge also joined the company’s own warehouses and factories, and it was one of the most recognisable places in the Manila of before the Second World War.⁵

Basque trade reached China too. Manuel de Agote y Bonechea was the first factor of the Real Compañía de Filipinas (Royal Philippine Company) in Canton between 1787 and 1796, and he left some diaries, kept at the Untzi Museoa-Museo Naval in Donostia-San Sebastián, in which the company’s business in China and its dealings with the Chinese merchants were recorded.⁷