Spain’s Basque autonomy has a capital in practice, not law
Spain's Basque Autonomous Community, Euskadi, joins Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa into one of the most decentralised regions anywhere. It has no official capital: Vitoria-Gasteiz hosts the parliament and government, Bilbao the high court, and nearly half of its 2.2 million people live around Bilbao.
The community rests on the Gernika Statute, approved by referendum on 25 October 1979 after the 1978 Spanish Constitution recognised the Basque Country as a nationality. Before then the three provinces had been called the Provincias Vascongadas since 1833. An earlier statute took effect only in Biscay in October 1936, mid-Civil War, and lapsed when Nationalist troops arrived. Navarre, which narrowly turned down a joint statute in 1932, got its own charter in 1982. The Economist has judged the region more autonomous than nearly any other in Europe.
Self-rule here has deep roots. The western Basque districts kept their own laws and institutions even after Castile absorbed them in 1199–1200, a system partly suppressed in 1839 and abolished in 1876 in exchange for a tax-collection deal. The provinces still gather taxes through provincial councils coordinated by the Basque Government, and the community runs its own police, the Ertzaintza, along with schools, health care and broadcasting. Nationalists point out that the region recorded Spain's highest abstention, and a larger no vote, in the 1978 constitutional referendum.
Vitoria-Gasteiz is the largest municipality by area, at 277 square kilometres, but Bilbao, with 347,342 residents, is the most populous, and six of the ten biggest cities belong to Greater Bilbao. About 28.2 per cent of residents were born outside the region; twentieth-century arrivals came mostly from Galicia and Castile and León, recent ones largely from South America. In 2019, 60 per cent called themselves Catholic, yet the community ranks among Spain's most secular.
Spanish and Basque are both official. The share of over-16s who speak Basque climbed from 24.1 per cent in 1991 to 36.2 per cent in 2021, peaking in Gipuzkoa, where more than half speak it, and lowest in Álava. The Basque Nationalist Party has governed since the first autonomous cabinet except from 2009 to 2012. Its 2003 Ibarretxe Plan to rewrite the statute passed the Basque Parliament but was blocked in Madrid by Spain's two main parties.
Source: Basque Country (autonomous community)
