ruta turística de arrigorriaga el secreto de las piedras rojas
- 1
- Euskara
- 2
- Mythology
- 3
- Battle of Padura
- 4
- General Assembly
- 5
- Carlist Wars
- 6
- Economy
- 7
- Emigration
- 8
- Basque Sports
The Carlist Wars
On-one knows whether the legendary battle of Arrigorriaga ever actually took place, but two armies have certainly clashed in this area on other occasions. Arrigorriaga is a bottleneck, a strategic point where the Nervión valley narrows just before opening up into the Ibaizabal river basin. Whoever controls the bridge here holds the key to the route that links Bilbao with Castile. The bridge over the Nervión that you see before you is called the Moyordin bridge. It was built to replace an earlier one which was washed away by the terrible floods of the summer of 1983.
That earlier bridge was itself built on top of an even older one, made entirely of stone, with several arches spanning the river. It was that bridge that the three elderly hunters, veterans of the Carlist armies, were crossing when they ran into Antxón and Koli.The bridge was the setting for a violent battle which took place on the 7th of May 1872, during the first skirmishes of the last Carlist war. At that point in the history of Arrigorriaga, the landscape here was very different from what you can see now.
Carlist troops
Imagine the bridge standing alone, with no buildings around it. Imagine that on both banks of the river there are fields and orchards stretching as far as the houses by the church that you have just visited. The area which is now the centre of Arrigorriaga was occupied only by scattered farmhouses. This is where a column of the liberal army, loyal to King Amadeo I, found itself when Carlist troops laid siege to the town.
The military command sent reinforcements from Bilbao and the besieged troops managed to escape, but Arrigorriaga fell to the Carlists. Although they had relatively few soldiers, they were bold enough to move right up to the very edge of Bilbao, causing their Liberal neighbours more than a few butterflies in the stomach over the next few days. The city had not yet had time to set up its defences, so had they continued their advance the course of the war could have changed radically. But they were too cautious to proceed.
In the end the war lasted four long years, and by the time the last shots were fired in 1876 10 field hospitals had been set up in Arrigorriaga to care for the wounded from the whole area. The Carlists lost this was, just as they did the two previous Carlist wars, and their defeat was seen as a defeat and humiliation for the rural Basque Country, which lost many of its rights and its traditional social structure as a result. In July that same year, Spanish Prime Minster Cánovas de Castillo suppressed the exemptions from paying taxes and from doing military service, which had until then been enjoyed by Vizcaya, Guipuzcoa and Alava.
Abolished
A year later the Basque general assemblies were also abolished. The abolition of the traditional codes of Basque law led to the appearance of new cultural movements and political groups. It also sparked a cultural renaissance in which the importance of the Basque language, Euskera, was stressed along with a strong feeling of “Basqueness” which led, in the last few years of the century, to the birth of Basque nationalism. The wounds left by the Carlist wars were reopened with exceptional violence in the summer of 1936, with the military uprising that marked the beginning of the Civil War.