In 1991, I traveled, for the first time, to the Basque Country. Though my dad was born there, and my mom’s grandparents as well, we’d never made a family trek as it simply was beyond our resources. My dad himself only went back a handful of times during the first 30 years he was in […]
Here are two articles that provide some interesting Basque history, both outside of the Basque Country. The first, an article at the Blue Review by Kyle Eidson and Dave Lachiondo, describes an interesting period in the history of the Basque diaspora in Boise. During the middle of the 1950s, when new Basques were immigrating to […]
File this in the simply awesome category! The Basque Studies Foundation, in Boise, is trying to bring Athletic Bilbao to play a friendly against a Major League Soccer team! This is going to be in the stadium on the Boise State campus (you know the one, the one with the blue field). They are still […]
Roughly about 20 years ago, during my second visit to the Basque Country, a friend of mine, Xabier Ormaetxea, who has been a frequent contributor to these pages particularly with the Basque surname research he used to do for visitors, took me to Butron Castle (Butroi in Basque). Not far from Bilbao, in the heart of […]
I’m a man of simple tastes, seemingly from a long line of Uberuagas with similar levels of refinement. My dad would rather make sure he get his dollar’s worth at an all-you-can-eat buffet. And when I took my aunts, who grew up in rural Bizkaia, to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, and I asked them what […]
Being a somewhat older American, my appreciation for soccer (or futbol, though to be fair, soccer may have been the original term for the sport, even in England) is limited. When I lived in Donostia, I of course saw the Real Sociedad banners in all corners of the city and knew that there was an […]
The third and final installment of Guillermo Zubiaga’s epic about Basque whaling, Joanes or the Basque Whaler: Priest of Pirates, follows the final exploits of Guillermo’s hero, Joanes. This graphic novel, based on historical documents of Basque derring-do on the high seas, culminates the grand adventures of Joanes and his crew as they encounter deadly […]
I ran across a few articles dealing with food and wine in the Basque Country that I thought were particularly interesting. First, in this article at Financial Times, Paul Richardson describes his adventures in San Sebastián’s Old Town, the Parte Vieja. The interesting spin here is a so-called pintxos passport. A company, San Sebastián Food, […]
The Buber Prizes are an annual event in which the best Basque websites and internet applications are recognized. For me, these awards are particularly meaningful, as the awards are named after these pages, partially as a recognition of the role of Buber’s Basque Page in the history of Basques on the internet and partially because […]
There has been a lot of activity around ETA and related groups in the Basque Country the last few weeks. First, the European Court of Human Rights ordered Spain to release several prisoners (up to 60) who had been jailed for terrorist attacks. This of course caused significant backlash from the families of the victims […]
