Spain

Leaving Euskal Herria for Madrid or Barcelona was emigration too, even with no border to cross, and those colonies created their own associations. This diaspora has two very different faces: that of the Basques who from the sixteenth century onwards held posts in the royal administration and at Court, and that of the internal emigration of the twentieth century, which by 1975 had almost fifty thousand people born in Araba, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa or Navarre registered as residents in Madrid alone. The nine Basque centres recognised today lie outside Euskal Herria and within the same state, in Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Valladolid, Zaragoza, Palma and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria.¹

The first of those faces is the older one. According to Pablo J. Beltrán de Heredia, author of the history of the Euskal Etxea of Madrid, one of the reasons there were so many Basques in the Spanish administration was that they were hidalgos: royal decrees recognised them as such, and with that status they could hold public office. That presence is noticeable above all from the sixteenth century and reached its height in the eighteenth.² It was in that century, in 1715, that the Basques of Madrid founded a religious and charitable congregation that is still active today (see the Congregación de San Ignacio).³

By the middle of the nineteenth century the colony already numbered in the thousands, and there were more women than men in it. According to the study by the historian Estíbaliz Ruiz de Azúa cited by Beltrán de Heredia, in 1850 there were 5,261 immigrants from Bizkaia, Araba and Gipuzkoa living in Madrid, 1,886 men and 3,375 women, in a city of 221,707 inhabitants. Among them were 442 merchants, 15.56% of all those in the capital, and 1,129 women and 71 men worked in domestic service.²

Around the turn of the century they looked for somewhere to meet. In the Madrid of the late nineteenth century several short-lived Basque-Navarrese societies followed one another and large frontons were built; the Beti Jai, opened in 1894, is the only one that survives (see the Basques of Madrid).³⁹ In 1917 there was a Euzko-Etxea in Madrid, and in 1923 the Hogar Vasco was founded (see the Hogar Vasco of Madrid).² That same year the Solar Vasco-Navarro existed in Barcelona (see the Basques of Barcelona).⁴

The war changed what those houses were used for and ended up closing them. In Madrid, the Milicias Vascas set up in the Hogar Vasco; in Barcelona, the Basque Government opened the Delegación de Euzkadi en Cataluña, which looked after the Basque refugees.²⁴ The Barcelona house closed in 1939, and the Madrid one in the early forties.⁴²

The figures of the twentieth century are on another scale. According to the National Statistics Institute, cited by Beltrán de Heredia, in 1975 there were 48,954 people born in Araba, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa or Navarre registered as residents in Madrid, not counting their children already born in Madrid.² They reached Barcelona in two waves: according to the 1986 municipal register analysed by F. Xavier Medina, above all before 1940 and in the decade 1971-1980. In the 1991 census, 7,571 residents of the municipality had been born in the Basque Country.⁴

Today’s centres began to appear in the middle of the century. Valencia has had a Basque centre since 1950; Barcelona opened its Euskal Etxea in 1979, the same year the Hogar Vasco of Madrid was constituted, and the most recent, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, was founded in 2023 (see the Basque community today).¹⁷