Basque Country (greater region)


The Basque Country is the name given to the home of the Basque people. The Basque Country is located in the western Pyrenees, straddling the border between France and Spain on the coast of the Bay of Biscay.
Encompassing the Autonomous Communities of the Basque Country and Navarre in Spain and the Northern Basque Country in France, the region is home to the Basque people, their language, culture and traditions. The area is neither linguistically nor culturally homogeneous, and certain areas have a majority of people who do not consider themselves Basque, such as the south of Navarre. The concept is still highly controversial, and the Supreme Court of Navarre has upheld a denial of government funding to school books that include the Navarre community within the Basque Country area.

Etymology

The name in Basque is Euskal Herria. The name is difficult to accurately translate into other languages due to the wide range of meanings of the Basque word herri. It can be translated as nation; country, land; people, population and town, village, settlement. The first part, Euskal, is the adjectival form of Euskara "the Basque language". Thus a more literal translation would be "country/nation/people/settlement of the Basque language", a concept difficult to render into a single word in most other languages.
The two earliest references are in Joan Perez de Lazarraga's manuscript, dated around 1564–1567 as eusquel erria and eusquel erriau and heuscal herrian and Heuscal-Herrian in Joanes Leizarraga's Bible translation, published in 1571.

Territory

The term Basque Country refers to a collection of regions inhabited by the Basque people, known as Euskal Herria in Basque language, and it is first attested as including seven traditional territories in Axular's literary work Gero, in the early 17th century. Some Basques refer to the seven traditional districts collectively as Zazpiak Bat, meaning "The Seven One", a motto coined in the late 19th century.

Northern Basque Country

The Northern Basque Country, known in Basque as Iparralde, is the part of the Basque Country that lies entirely within France, specifically in the western part of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques département of France. The modern-day Basque Municipal Community, with some slight adjustments, roughly lines up with this traditional region. Within these conventions, the area of Northern Basque Country is.
File:Maule.jpg|thumb|right|Town of Maule in Soule
File:San Sebastian from Igeldo.jpg|thumb|right|220px|San Sebastián or Donostia in the Basque language
The French Basque Country is traditionally subdivided into three provinces:
This summary presentation suggests difficulty in justifying the inclusion of a few communes in the lower Adour region. Jean Goyhenetche suggests it would be more accurate to depict the region as the reunion of five entities: Labourd, Lower Navarre, Soule but also Bayonne and Gramont.

Southern Basque Country

The Southern Basque Country, known in Basque as Hegoalde, is the part of the Basque region that lies completely within Spain. It is frequently known as Spanish Basque Country. It is the largest and most populated part of the Basque Country. It includes two main regions: the Basque Autonomous Community and the Chartered Community of Navarre.
The Basque Autonomous Community consists of three provinces, specifically designated "historical territories":
The Chartered Community of Navarre is a single-province autonomous community. Its name refers to the charters, the Fueros of Navarre. The Spanish Constitution of 1978 states that Navarre may become a part of the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country if it is so decided by its people and institutions. To date, there has been no implementation of this law. Despite demands for a referendum by minority leftist forces and Basque nationalists in Navarre, it has been opposed by mainstream Spanish parties and the Navarrese People's Union, which was the ruling party until 2015. The Union has repeatedly asked for an amendment to the Constitution to remove this clause.
In addition to those, two enclaves located outside of the respective autonomous community are often cited as being part of both the Basque Autonomous Community and also the Basque Country.
Navarre also holds two small enclaves in Aragon, organised as the municipality of Petilla de Aragón.

Climate

The Basque Country region is dominated by a warm, humid and wet oceanic climate. The coastal area is part of Green Spain and by extension, the climate is similar for Bayonne and Biarritz as well. Inland areas in Navarre and the southern regions of the autonomous community are transitional, with continental Mediterranean climate, with somewhat wider temperature swings between seasons. The list only sources locations in Spain, but Bayonne/Biarritz have a very similar climate to nearby Hondarribia on the Spanish side of the border. The values do not apply to Donostia-San Sebastián, since its weather station is at a higher elevation than the urban core, where temperatures are higher year-round and similar to those in Bilbao and Hondarribia.
LocationAugust August January January
Bilbao26/1579/5913/555/41
Vitoria-Gasteiz26/1278/538/147/34
Hondarribia25/1778/6313/455/40
Pamplona28/1483/579/149/34

Geology

The Triassic Basque-Cantabrian Basin lies at western end of the Pyrenees, bounded on the northwest and southeast by transform faults. Paleozoic massifs bounding the basin include the Asturian Massif to the west, the La Demanda Massif to the south, and the Cinco Villas and Quinto Real massifs to the east. The stratigraphic column includes the Upper Jurassic-Barremian continental siliclastic Wealdian Complex, the Aptian-Middle-Upper Albian Urgonian Limestone, and the Upper Albian-Cenomanian Supra-Urgonian Complex of deep turbidites and fluvial siliciclastic sediments. Siderite occurs in the Urgonian limestone, mining of which produced more than 300 million tons of iron ore from the mid 19th century to the beginning
of the 20th century. These hydrothermal mineral deposits occur within the strata or veins, sphalerite and galena being the main ore minerals. Surface weathering produced gossan, goethite, limonite, and hematite.

History

Ancient period

According to some theories, Basques may be the least assimilated remnant of the Paleolithic inhabitants of Western Europe to the Indo-European migrations. Basque tribes were mentioned by Greek writer Strabo and Roman writer Pliny the Elder, including the Vascones, the Aquitani, and others. There is considerable evidence to show their Basque ethnicity in Roman times in the form of place-names, Caesar's reference to their customs and physical make-up, the so-called Aquitanian inscriptions recording names of people and gods, etc.
Geographically, the Basque Country was inhabited in Roman times by several tribes: the Vascones, the Varduli, the Caristi, the Autrigones, the Berones, the Tarbelli, and the Sibulates. Some ancient place-names, such as Deba, Butrón, Nervión, Zegama, suggest the presence of non-Basque peoples at some point in protohistory. The ancient tribes are last cited in the 5th century, after which track of them is lost, with only Vascones still being accounted for, while extending far beyond their former boundaries, e.g. in the current lands of Álava and most conspicuously around the Pyrenees and Novempopulania.
The territory of the Cantabri encompassed probably present-day Biscay, Cantabria, Burgos and at least part of Álava and La Rioja, i.e. to the west of Vascon territory in the Early Middle Ages, but the ethnic nature of this people, often at odds with and finally overcome by the Visigoths, is not certain. The Vascones around Pamplona, after much fighting against Franks and Visigoths, founded the Kingdom of Pamplona, inextricably linked to their kinsmen the Banu Qasi.
All other tribes in the Iberian Peninsula had been, to a great extent, assimilated by Roman culture and language by the end of the Roman period or early period of the Early Middle Ages, while ethnic Basques inhabited well east into the lands of the Pyrenees from the 8th to the 11th century.

Middle Ages

In the Early Middle Ages the territory between the Ebro and Garonne rivers was known as Vasconia, a blurred ethnic area and polity struggling to fend off the Frankish feudal authority from the north and the pressure of the Iberian Visigoths and Andalusi Cordovans from the south.
By the turn of the millennium, a receding Carolingian royal authority and establishing feudalism left Vasconia fragmented into a myriad of counties and viscounties, e.g. Fezensac, Bigorre, Astarac, Béarn, Tartas, Marsan, Soule, Labourd, etc., out of former tribal systems and minor realms, while south of the Pyrenees, besides the above Kingdom of Pamplona, Gipuzkoa, Álava and Biscay arose in the current lands of the Southern Basque Country from the 9th century onward.
These westerly territories pledged intermittent allegiance to Navarre in their early stages, but were annexed to the Kingdom of Castile at the end of the 12th century, so depriving the Kingdom of Navarre of direct access to the ocean. In the Late Middle Ages, important families dotting the whole Basque territory came to prominence, often quarreling with each other for power and unleashing the bloody War of the Bands, only stopped by royal intervention and the gradual shift of power from the countryside to the towns by the 16th century. Meanwhile, the viscounties of Labourd and Soule under English suzerainty were finally incorporated to France after the Hundred Years' War, with Bayonne remaining the last Plantagenet stronghold up to 1453.