Begoña
Begoña or more puristically but more spelled Begoina, meaning'the lower foot', is a historical municipality of Biscay, incorporated to Bilbao in 1925. It included all the uplands south and east of the medieval walled town, that now form the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and parts of 5th urban districts of Bilbao. Nowadays the name is limited to the district including Santutxu and Begoña proper, a small residential neighbourhood between the Basilica and the garden area of Etxebarria Park. A notable person with this given name is a Spanish Olympic judoka. Due to its association with a church dedicated to Our Lady of Begoña, the name of the neighbourhood is a popular name of women in the Basque Country
Durangaldea
Durangaldea is a comarca of Biscay located in the Basque Country, Spain. It is one of the seven regions that compose the province of Biscay; the capital city of Durangaldea is Durango. Durangaldea is located at the southeast of the province of Biscay, limiting with the provinces of Gipuzkoa and Álava, it spans the border with the province of Álava in the south. Its total extension is 240,13 km². Most of the towns that compose the comarca are located on a great valley formed by the Ibaizabal river, that crosses it from east to west. Otxandio is the only town, not part of the valley. Durangaldea was during the Middle Ages a district apart from Biscay and a dependency of Navarre, but was conquered by Castile in 1200, it remained separate from Biscay until 1630, it held its own compilation of laws, with its regional council joining in Gerediaga, Abadiño. Its lords founded four chartered towns, namely Ermua, Elorrio and Otxandio. Durangaldea is divided into twelve municipalities, being Durango the capital city.
The municipalities that compose the comarca are the same ones that made the merindad of Durango, the previous administrative division. Ermua and Mallabia belong to the province of Biscay, but are not part of Durangaldea, being part of other comarca, part of Gipuzkoa; the economy of Durangaldea is industrial, although the primary sector is important. It is the second most important sector of the economy in the region after the industry; the animal husbandry is specially important, as well as the wood production. The minery is an important section of the economy being produced limestone and marble. Mines of iron and copper have been exploited; the siderurgy has been one of the most developed type of industries in Durangaldea. Besides it, other industries like paper producers or tool producers exist. Durangaldea is connected to the three Basque provinces by roads, Álava in the south by the BI-623 and Bilbao and Donostia by the road N-634; the Cantabric Highway crosses the comarca, can be accessed from Durango and connects the city with Bilbao and the French border.
EuskoTren operates in the region, offering commuter rail services. The train line connects with Bilbao and other comarcas of the province and with Gipuzkoa. EuskoTren has train stations in Abadiño, Amorebieta-Etxano, Berriz and Zaldibar; the bus company BizkaiBus operates in the region, connecting all the municipalities with others on different comarcas. Lord of Biscay Durango, Biscay Comarcas of Spain
Fuero
Fuero, Foro or Foru is a Spanish legal term and concept. The word comes from Latin forum, an open space used as market and meeting place; the same Latin root is the origin of the French terms for and foire, the Portuguese terms foro and foral. The Spanish term fuero has a wide range of meanings, depending upon its context, it has meant a compilation of laws a local or regional one. In many of these senses, its equivalent in the medieval England would be the custumal. In the 20th century, Francisco Franco's regime used the term fueros for several of the fundamental laws; the term implied these were not constitutions subject to debate and change by a sovereign people, but orders from the only legitimate source of authority, as in feudal times. Fuero dates back to the feudal era: the lord could concede or acknowledge a fuero to certain groups or communities, most notably the Roman Catholic Church, the military, certain regions that fell under the same monarchy as Castile or Spain, but were not integrated into those countries.
The relations among fueros, other bodies of law, sovereignty is a contentious one that influences government and law in the present day. The king of León, Alfonso V, decreed the Fuero de León, considered the earliest laws governing territorial and local life, as it applied to the entire kingdom, with certain provisions for the city of León; the various Basque provinces generally regarded their fueros known as jauntxos as tantamount to a municipal constitution. This view was accepted including President of the United States John Adams, he cited the Biscayan fueros as a precedent for the United States Constitution. This view regards fueros as acknowledging rights. In the contrasting view, fueros were privileges granted by a monarch. In the letter Adams commented on the substantial independence of the hereditary Basque Jauntxo families as the origin for their privileges. In practice, distinct fueros for specific classes, towns, or regions arose out of feudal power politics; some historians believe monarchs were forced to concede some traditions in exchange for the general acknowledgment of his or her authority, that monarchs granted fueros to reward loyal subjection, or the monarch acknowledged distinct legal traditions.
In medieval Castilian law, the king could assign privileges to certain groups. The classic example of such a privileged group was the Roman Catholic Church: the clergy did not pay taxes to the state, enjoyed the income via tithes of local landholding, were not subject to the civil courts. Church-operated ecclesiastical courts tried churchmen for criminal offenses. Another example was the powerful Mesta organization, composed of wealthy sheepherders, who were granted vast grazing rights in Andalusia after that land was "reconquered" by Spanish Christians from the Muslims. Lyle N. McAlister writes in Spain and Portugal in the New World that the Mesta's fuero helped impede the economic development of southern Spain; this resulted in a lack of opportunity, Spaniards emigrated to the New World to escape these constraints. During the Reconquista, the feudal lords granted fueros to some villas and cities, to encourage the colonization of the frontier and of commercial routes; these laws regulated the governance and the penal and civil aspects of the places.
The fueros codified for one place were granted to another, with small changes, instead of crafting a new redaction from scratch. In contemporary Spanish usage, the word fueros most refers to the historic and contemporary fueros or charters of certain regions of the Basque regions; the equivalent for French usage is fors. The whole central and western Pyrenean region was inhabited by the Basques in the early Middle Ages within the Duchy of Vasconia; the Basques and the Pyrenean peoples—as Romance language replaced Basque in many areas by the turn of the first millennium—governed themselves by a native a set of rules, different from Roman and Gothic law but with an ever-increasing imprint of them. Their laws, arising from regional traditions and practices, were kept and transmitted orally; because of this oral tradition, the Basque-language regions preserved their specific laws longer than did those Pyrenean regions that adopted Romance languages. For example, Navarrese law developed along less feudal lines than those of surrounding realms.
The Fors de Bearn are another example of Pyrenean law. Two sayings address this legal idiosyncrasy: "en Navarra hubo antes leyes que reyes," and "en Aragón antes que rey hubo ley," both meaning that law developed and existed before the kings; the force of these principles required monarchs to accommodate to the laws. This situation sometimes strained relations between the monarch and the kingdom if the monarchs were alien to native laws. In 1234 when the first foreign king, the French Theobald I of Champagne arrived in the area, he did not know Navarrese common law, he appointed a commission to write the laws. The accession of French lineages to the throne of Navarre brought a relationship between the king and the kingdom, alien to the Basques; the resulting disagreements were a major factor in the 13th-century uprisings and clashes between diff
Eduardo Chillida
Eduardo Chillida Juantegui, or Eduardo Txillida Juantegi in Basque, was a Spanish Basque sculptor notable for his monumental abstract works. Born in San Sebastián to Pedro Chillida and the soprano Carmen Juantegui on 10 January 1924, Eduardo Chillida grew up near the Biarritz Hotel, owned by his grandparents. Chillida had been the goalkeeper for Real Sociedad, San Sebastián's La Liga football team, where his knee was so injured that he had five surgeries, ending a promising football career, he studied architecture at the University of Madrid from 1943 to 1946. In 1947 he abandoned architecture for art, the next year he moved to Paris, where he set up his first studio and began working in plaster and clay, he never instead began to take private art lessons. He lived in Paris from 1948 to 50 and at Villaines-sous-Bois from 1950 to 1955. In 1950 Chillida married Pilar Belzunce and returned to the San Sebastián area, first to the nearby village of Hernani and in 1959 to the city of his birth, where he remained.
He died at his home near San Sebastián at the age of 78. Chillida's sculptures concentrated on the human form. Chillida himself tended to reject the label of "abstract", preferring instead to call himself a "realist sculptor". Upon returning to the Basque Country in 1951, Chillida soon abandoned the plaster he used in his Paris works – a medium suited to his study of archaic figurative works in the Louvre. Living near Hernani, he began to work in forged iron with the help of the local blacksmith, soon set up a forge in his studio. From 1954 until 1966, Chillida worked on a series entitled Anvil of Dreams, in which he used wood for the first time as a base from which the metal forms rise up in explosive rhythmic curves, he began to make sculpture in alabaster 1965. Rather than turn over a maquette of a sculpture to fabricators, as many modern artists do, Chillida worked with the men in the foundry, he usually added an alloy that caused the metal to take on a brilliant rust color as it oxidizes.
From quite early on, Chillida's sculpture found public recognition, and, in 1954, he produced the four doors for the basilica of Arantzazu, where works by other leading Basque sculptors – Jorge Oteiza, Agustin Ibarrola and Nestor Basterretxea – were being installed. The following year, he carved a stone monument to the discoverer of penicillin, Sir Alexander Fleming, for a park in San Sebastián. By the early 1970s, his steel sculptures had been installed in front of the Unesco headquarters in Paris, the ThyssenKrupp building in Düsseldorf, in a courtyard at the World Bank offices in Washington At their best his works, although massive and monumental, suggest movement and tension. For example, the largest of his works in the United States, De Musica is an 81-ton steel sculpture featuring two pillars with arms that reach out but do not touch. Much of Chillida's work is inspired by his Basque upbringing, many of his sculptures' titles are in the Basque language Euskera, his steel sculpture De Música III was exhibited at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the UK, as part of a retrospective of Chillida's work.
Chillida's cast iron sculpture Topos V has been displayed in Plaça del Rei, since 1986. Chillida conceived a distinguished oeuvre of etchings and woodcuts since 1959, including illustrations for Jorge Guillen's Mas Alla and various other books. In the 1990s, Chillida set up a foundation for the display of his work, at the Chillida Leku, centred on an old farmhouse, in the Basque countryside. Today there is an outdoor sculpture garden dedicated to his work. According to Chillida's plans for a Monument of Tolerance, an artificial cave is to be bored into the mountain; the huge cubic cave, measuring 40 metres along each side, is to be dug from inside a mountain that has long been revered by the inhabitants of the dusty, barren island to the south of Lanzarote. About 64,000 cubic metres of rock will be taken away from the mountain, which rises out of an arid landscape in the north of the island, to create what Chillida called his'monument to tolerance'. Chillida's original idea was for visitors to experience the immensity of the space.
The project has been in development eight years before Chillida's death. In 2011 local authorities decided to go ahead with a project by Chillida inside Mount Tindaya on Fuerteventura despite concerns from environmentalists; as of 2013, local officials are continuing to seek €75 million in private funding. In the early 1960s Eduardo Chillida engaged into a dialog with the German philosopher Martin Heidegger; when the two men met, they discovered that from different angles, they were "working" with space in the same way. Heidegger wrote: "We would have to learn to recognize that things themselves are places and do not belong to a place," and that sculpture is thereby "...the embodiment of places." Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness.
Heidegger suggests. Chillida has been quoted as saying: "My whole Work is a journey of discovery in Space. Space is the liveliest of all, the one that surrounds us.... I do not believe so much in experience. I think. I believe in percept
Basques
The Basques are an indigenous ethnic group characterised by the Basque language, a common culture and shared genetic ancestry to the ancient Vascones and Aquitanians. Basques are indigenous to and inhabit an area traditionally known as the Basque Country, a region, located around the western end of the Pyrenees on the coast of the Bay of Biscay and straddles parts of north-central Spain and south-western France; the English word Basque may be pronounced or and derives from the French Basque, derived from Gascon Basco, cognate with Spanish Vasco. These, in turn, come from plural Vascones; the Latin labial-velar approximant /w/ evolved into the bilabials /b/ and /β̞/ in Gascon and Spanish under the influence of Basque and Aquitanian, a language related to old Basque and spoken in Gascony in Antiquity. Several coins from the 2nd and 1st centuries BC found in the Basque Country bear the inscription barscunes; the place where they were minted is not certain, but is thought to be somewhere near Pamplona, in the heartland of the area that historians believe was inhabited by the Vascones.
Some scholars have suggested a Celtic etymology based on bhar-s-, meaning "summit", "point" or "leaves", according to which barscunes may have meant "the mountain people", "the tall ones" or "the proud ones", while others have posited a relationship to a proto-Indo-European root *bar- meaning "border", "frontier", "march". In Basque, people call themselves singular euskaldun, formed from euskal - and - dun. Not all Basques are Basque-speakers. Therefore, the neologism euskotar, plural euskotarrak, was coined in the 19th century to mean a culturally Basque person, whether Basque-speaking or not. Alfonso Irigoyen posits that the word euskara is derived from an ancient Basque verb enautsi "to say" and the suffix -ara, thus euskara would mean "way of saying", "way of speaking". One item of evidence in favour of this hypothesis is found in the Spanish book Compendio Historial, written in 1571 by the Basque writer Esteban de Garibay, he records the name of the Basque language as enusquera. It may, however, be a writing mistake.
In the 19th century, the Basque nationalist activist Sabino Arana posited an original root euzko which, he thought, came from eguzkiko. On the basis of this putative root, Arana proposed the name Euzkadi for an independent Basque nation, composed of seven Basque historical territories. Arana's neologism Euzkadi is still used in both Basque and Spanish, since it is now the official name of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country. Since the Basque language is unrelated to Indo-European, it has long been thought to represent the people or culture that occupied Europe before the spread of Indo-European languages there. A comprehensive analysis of Basque genetic patterns has shown that Basque genetic uniqueness predates the arrival of agriculture in the Iberian Peninsula, about 7,000 years ago, it is thought that Basques are a remnant of the early inhabitants of Western Europe those of the Franco-Cantabrian region. Basque tribes were mentioned in Roman times by Strabo and Pliny, including the Vascones, the Aquitani, others.
There is enough evidence to support the hypothesis that at that time and they spoke old varieties of the Basque language. In the Early Middle Ages the territory between the Ebro and Garonne rivers was known as Vasconia, a vaguely defined ethnic area and political entity struggling to fend off pressure from the Iberian Visigothic kingdom and Arab rule to the south, as well as the Frankish push from the north. By the turn of the first millennium, the territory of Vasconia had fragmented into different feudal regions, such as Soule and Labourd, while south of the Pyrenees the Castile and the Pyrenean counties of Aragon, Sobrarbe and Pallars emerged as the main regional entities with Basque population in the 9th and 10th centuries; the Kingdom of Pamplona, a central Basque realm known as Navarre, underwent a process of feudalization and was subject to the influence of its much larger Aragonese and French neighbours. Castile deprived Navarre of its coastline by conquering key western territories, leaving the kingdom landlocked.
The Basques were ravaged by the War of the Bands, bitter partisan wars between local ruling families. Weakened by the Navarrese civil war, the bulk of the realm fell before the onslaught of the Spanish armies. However, the Navarrese territory north of the Pyrenees remained beyond the reach of an powerful Spain. Lower Navarre became a province of France in 1620; the Basques enjoyed a great deal of self-government until the French Revolution and the Carlist Wars, when the Basques supported heir apparent Carlos V and his descendants. On either side of the Pyrenees, the Basques lost their native institutions and laws held during the Ancien régime. Since despite the current limited self-governing status of the Basque Autonomous Community and Navarre as settled by the Spanish Constitution, many Basques have attempted higher degrees of self-empowerment, sometimes by acts
Coat of arms of Basque Country (autonomous community)
The current Basque coat of arms is the official coat of arms of the Basque Country, Autonomous community of Spain. It consists of a party per cross representing the three historical territories of Álava and Biscay, as well as a fourth, void quarter; the arms are ringed by a regal wreath of symbolic of the Gernikako Arbola. The fourth quarter constituted since the late 19th century the linked chains of Navarre. After the end of home rule in 1839-1841, the Basque governments started a mutual approach out of common concerns in face of their exposure to Spanish centralism; the movement intensified after 1866, a motto was coined, the "Laurac bat",'the four make one', echoing the "Irurac bat" of the Royal Basque Company, which in turn crystallized in a coat of arms including the four historic Basque districts in Spain, to represent their common bonds, as claimed during that period by the chartered provincial governments, or the 1931 draft Statute of the Basque Country. In 1936, the Provisional Government of Euzkadi, presided over by the first president, José Antonio Aguirre, adopted the shield with the arms of the three provinces of Álava, Biscay comprised in the 1936 Statute, Navarre.
The president of the government affirmed in the preamble to the Decree of 19 October 1936, thereby approved, the emblem and flag, to be used by the Basque Country. Thus the shield of the Government of Euzkadi contained the arms of Álava, Gipuzkoa and Navarre in a single blazon of four quarters surrounded by a crown of oak leaves; the Provisional Government of Euzkadi stated that "the flag must be that which gathers Basque unity and which the use more frequent in the Basque lands, has sanctioned as such symbol of their unity." As an official shield, like the 1936 Basque Autonomous Community, disappeared after the pro-Franco victory in the Spanish Civil War, but the coat of arms continued in unofficial use, it was used in its flag by the rightist pro-rebel newspaper from Donostia El Diario Vasco during wartime. On 2 November 1978, the Consejo General del País Vasco, restored the republican shield, albeit modified as follows: The Álava quarter lost the motto "En aumento de la justicia contra malhechores" and both the designs of the castle and of the arm with sword were changed.
The castle is now on top of a grey rock and the arm and sword are light blue in colour. In the Biscay quarter, the wolves of the arms of the house of Haro were suppressed in 1986 and the field changed from gules to argent, the bordure from argent to gold, the crosses from sinople to gules, the ground from sinople to maroon. In the Gipuzkoa quarter, the field changed from argent to gold, the ground was removed, leaving only the trees and the waves; the fourth quarter once contained the linked chains of Navarre. In 1991 the Basque Government standardised the colours used in the shield. Basque nationalists, but not only, have used an unofficially recognised Basque coat of arms, the Zazpiak Bat, it has been argued that it differs from the original one by being divided into six squares and by including the coat of arms of the Basque regions in France. The motto "Zazpiak bat" was coined by Antoine-Thomson d'Abbadie in the late 19th century. Ikurriña Quartering Zazpiak Bat
