Venezuela

After the exile came economic emigration, and with it the Basques left Caracas for the interior of the country. Today the register lists four recognised bodies in Venezuela, one of them a federation, and a community that the Venezuelan crisis has hit head-on and that has seen, on the other side of the ocean, associations of Venezuelans spring up in the Basque Country.

The centres of the interior

With the emigration of the fifties, the Basques spread out across the country. To Valencia, in Carabobo, a city that was beginning to industrialise, the first documented Basques came between 1950 and 1955: the doctor Claudio Alegría, from Gernika; the engineer José María Beotegui, from Bermeo; and José Luis Unamuno, from Durango. In Chirgua eight families settled.¹⁷ In 1960, more than two hundred Basques from Aragua, Carabobo and Lara met the delegate of the Basque Government in Valencia.¹⁰

Fourteen years later, on 13 December 1974, the Centro Vasco Venezolano de Carabobo held its first general meeting.¹⁷ The Federación de Centros Vascos de Venezuela was formed in 1991.¹⁸

How many there are

This portal’s register of centres lists 4 recognised bodies in Venezuela: the Centro Vasco de Caracas, the Eusko Etxea Barcelona-Puerto La Cruz, the Centro Vasco Venezolano de Carabobo and the Federation.²¹

The electoral roll counts something else: citizens of the Basque Autonomous Community who live in Venezuela, not descendants. In 1999 there were 2,271 of them, and Venezuela was the country with the third largest number of registered Basque citizens in the world, behind only France and Argentina; in 2005 it was still third, with 3,956.¹⁸

The Venezuelan crisis

The country’s crisis hit the Basque community head-on. In 2017, the Basque Government granted emergency aid to 111 families from 16 Basque centres in six countries, and Venezuela took 37% of the budget. The following year, the Director for the Basque Community Abroad explained that the Basque Government was receiving a large number of enquiries about return and requests for help from the Basque-Venezuelan community.¹⁹

The road has also been travelled the other way, and today there are Venezuelans in the Basque Country, organised in associations in Araba, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. In July 2026, the Basque Government met them to organise support for the Venezuelan families living in the Basque Country who had been affected by the earthquake in Venezuela.²⁰