Uruguay

The Basques of Montevideo organised early, and almost always arguing over who belonged inside. Their first society, from 1876, was born to protect the newly arrived immigrant and for a long time was held to be the first in the world; it ended up split in two, and its premises were auctioned off. Then came the two oldest Basque bodies in Uruguay that are still open, the Centro Euskaro and Euskal Erria.

The Laurak Bat of Montevideo, one of the first Basque societies in America

It all began on Christmas Day 1876, when a group of Basques meeting at the Club Literario Artístico Uruguayo decided to create a society of their own. The society’s annual report recalled it like this in 1884: it had sprung from the patriotism of the Basques, “moved by the misfortune” of their land after the law of 1876 that abolished the fueros, the old Basque charters.⁵ Its statutes were approved on 1 January 1877.⁶

The official name already said what it was created for: Sociedad Protectora de la Inmigración Vascongada Laurak Bat, the Laurak Bat Society for the Protection of Basque Immigration. It set out to protect the immigrant from Navarre, Gipuzkoa, Bizkaia or Araba who reached Uruguay and to find him work anywhere in the country.⁶ Laurak bat means “the four, one”: the four Basque provinces on the Spanish side.

It was born months before its namesake in Buenos Aires, the Argentine Laurak Bat, created on 13 March 1877. That is why for a long time it was considered the first Basque centre in the world, and it still presents itself that way.⁸ Later research, taken up by the Basque Government itself, calls for a qualification of that title: in the Cuban city of Matanzas there existed from 1868 a Sociedad de Beneficencia de naturales y descendientes de las Provincias Vasco-Navarras, a charitable society for natives and descendants of the Basque-Navarrese provinces, documented in the provincial archive and active at least until 1891.¹³ The Laurak Bat is, then, the first Basque society on the River Plate, but not the first in America on record.

The society did not stop at finding work for the newcomers. From April 1877 it published the newspaper Laurac Bat, considered the first newspaper of the Basque diaspora, edited by José de Umarán. In 1882 it created a separate body, the Caja Vasco Navarra de Reempatrio, a fund to help anyone who needed it to go back home. And in 1884 it opened the door to those from the other side of the border: it reformed its statutes to admit people born on both sides of the Pyrenees, changed its name to Sociedad Euskara, and its newspaper was renamed El Euskaro.⁶⁷

A split and an end

A year earlier the society had already split. In 1883 the naturalist José Arechavaleta broke away from the Laurak Bat with his nephew Pedro de Hormaeche and twenty other members, and founded the Centro Vascongado.⁵ Both societies ended up being dissolved, each in its own winding-up proceedings, and the final act was the public auction of the premises of the Campo Euskaro on 31 July 1898.⁵ By then some were already starting again: in January 1897, Basques in Montevideo were taking the first steps towards a new society.⁵

The Centro Euskaro (1911) and Euskal Erria (1912)

The two oldest Basque bodies still active in Uruguay were born nine months apart, and what divided them was precisely the question of who could be a member.

The Centro Euskaro was founded on 29 June 1911 and admitted only Basques from Araba, Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa and Navarre. In 1915 it added “Español” to its name, and in 1994 it went back to being called the Centro Euskaro.⁹

Euskal Erria was born, in large part, as a response to that exclusion.⁹ Its founding assembly was held on the night of 30 March 1912 in the halls of the Sociedad Española, with some 350 people present. The name Zazpirak Bat (“the seven, one”) was considered, but Euskal Erria won out, proposed by Hermenegildo Aramendi, a former secretary of the Laurak Bat of Montevideo.⁵ The new society set out to bring together “all the Basques and their descendants”, with equal rights for all the natives of Euskal Herria, and it wrote this into its statutes with a clause that made it visible every year: the presidency alternated between a native of the French Basque Country and one of the Basque Country on the Spanish side.⁵

In its early years it had no home and met in borrowed premises: the Círculo Católico de Obreros, the Club Español and the Sociedad Francesa. In November 1912 Inciarte, who would go on to preside over the society, bought the Cancha de Basilio, a fronton, in his own name, and the society bought it from him in 1926.¹⁴ That fronton was no small detail. A document of the time, quoted by the society’s historians, put it bluntly: there could be no society of true Basques “without having, before anything else, a pelota court”.⁵ A 2025 study shows that, between 1912 and 1939, pelota was the centre of the club’s social life and its bridge to the urban middle class of Montevideo, which saw in the sport an expression of modernity.¹⁰

The society also published its own newspaper, Euskal Erria, for 48 years (1912-1960): the longest-lived Basque-Uruguayan publication.⁷