Visit Basques In Idaho And Europe

Sun., Jan. 4, 1998

From Wire Reports

Q. I am interested in the Basque culture, and am considering a trip to Europe to travel through the Basque country there. Please tell me where to get more information.

A. Actually, you can meet Basques either by going to their home territory in Spain and France, or traveling to Idaho, home to 20,000 Basque descendants. The biggest concentration of Basques outside Europe is in the Boise valley.

In downtown Boise, what’s known as the Basque Block on Grove Street includes a museum and shop, a social club and two former rooming houses where Basque shepherds once spent their winters.

I have been to the Spanish and French Basque regions, but I learned more about the culture on a trip to Boise, thanks to Patty Miller, a third-generation American Basque who works at the Boise museum.

Miller showed me a genealogical research center and a classroom for language lessons, explaining that there has been a recent resurgence in interest in the language called Euskera. It is older than Latin and has no similarities to any other language.

But despite so many Basques living in the area, their national sport of jai alai is not played in Idaho.

Talking with Miller put into perspective what I’d experienced on a driving trip through the Basque region that straddles the frontier of southwestern France and northern Spain. Natives call it Euskadi. It is a region of rugged mountains, rolling hills, green valleys and seashores along the Bay of Biscay that includes three Spanish provinces and one French department.

Guernica (Gernika), the Boise restaurant/bar, is named for a place in Spain the Basques will never forget. This one-time seat of the Basque parliament and the 300-year-old “Tree of Guernica,” symbol of Basque rights, was bombed by the Germans in 1937 with Franco’s consent, killing more than 2,000.

A famous Picasso painting, “Guernica,” shows the bombing aftermath. It was the destruction of Guernica, since rebuilt, and Franco’s banning of the language, that sparked the rise of a separatist movement.

If you go, you’ll find the most hotels in the two biggest cities, San Sebastian and Bilbao. Across the border in France, two coastal resorts in Basque country include the charming St. Jean-de-Luz, where I’d stay as first choice, and the more staid, reserved Biarritz.

To learn more write: Tourist Office of Spain, 1221 Brickell Ave., Suite 1850, Miami, FL 33131; French Government Tourist Office, 444 Madison Ave., 16th Floor, New York, NY 10022; Idaho Travel Council, 800-VISIT-ID.

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