Basque Country

The people whose language nobody can connect to any other, on both sides of a border they predate. Euskara is a language isolate - not Indo-European, with no demonstrated relation to anything living or dead - and its speakers have occupied the western Pyrenees since before the Romans, who conquered around them rather than through them. That continuity produced the fueros, charters of local self-government and tax autonomy that Castilian and French kings swore to uphold, and which the Basques defended in the Carlist Wars of the nineteenth century. Spain abolished most of them in 1876. Iron and shipbuilding then made Bilbao an industrial centre. Franco's forces, with German aircraft, bombed Gernika in April 1937 - the town holding the oak under which the fueros were sworn - and the regime banned the language afterwards. ETA's armed campaign from 1959 killed around eight hundred people before it disarmed in 2011. The Spanish Basque Country now has fiscal autonomy that lets it collect its own taxes, an arrangement almost unique in Europe. Euskara has around three quarters of a million speakers and is taught in schools. Basque sailors were whaling off Newfoundland by the sixteenth century. The region spans four Spanish provinces and three French ones, with around three million people. Bilbao's Guggenheim, opened in 1997, is credited with reviving the city. Pelota is the characteristic sport. Basque cuisine holds an unusual concentration of highly rated restaurants. The txakoli wine and pintxo bars are regional institutions. San Sebastian and Bilbao are the largest cities on the Spanish side.

• Existed: 700 CE – present
• Type: Entity