In his blog, Ricardo Ibarra posted an infographic taken from El Correo that shows the breakdown of the last elections by region within the Basque Autonomous Community, an image shamelessly stolen from him and reposted here (click on the image for a bigger version).

It is interesting to see how things break down.  Gipuzkoa went overwhelmingly for the new party, Bildu.  Bizkaia is more traditionalist/conservative and went more for EAJ/PNV.  Araba is a mix of pretty much everything, though still a majority of EAJ and Bildu.

One thing I find interesting is that Araba is strongly Bildu along its border with both Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa, which maybe makes some sense — those regions would have maybe the strongest Basque identity.  But, that didn’t happen so much in Bizkaia.  While there are pockets of Bildu strength, it isn’t reflected in the border with Gipuzkoa, for example. Not saying it means anything, I just find it an interesting observation.

A while back I found an awesome book that showed the coats-of-arms of most of the towns and villages of Bizkaia.  Each town was given a different page, with a drawing of the escudo and some information about the town. I’d always hoped to find something similar for the other provinces, but was never able to.  These days, though, if it’s in a book, it’s very likely to be online as well.  Thus, it should come as no surprise that there are lists of the municipalities of the various provinces and their heraldry, and maybe the best site for this is Wikipedia.

They have different sections for the coats-of-arms of the towns of Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Araba, Nafarroa, and, lumped together with other provinces of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Iparralde — the French Basque Country.

I imagine these aren’t complete, but they do give a very nice visual display of the towns and villages of the Basque Country.  I think it would be great to also have something about the origins of each individual coat-of-arms, but that is asking a lot.

There are versions of these on the Spanish version of Wikipedia as well, which do give more detail, such as the actual description of the coat-of-arms.  For example, see this page for Bizkaia and this one for Nafarroa.