ABSTRACT
When, in 1849, Francisco de Paula Madrazo wrote up his expedition to the Basque province ofGuipuzcoa, on the Biscay coast in northern Spain just south of the French border, his eulogy of the landscape, climate and people followed a newly-conventional pattern. He moved quickly from the endless new enchantments of the landscape of the 'heaven-blessed provinces', with their mild temperatures and benign climate (which made Guipuzcoa such a perfect refuge from Madrid in its summer dog-days), to the similar attributes of the inhabitants, who were sweet-natured and full of goodwill by nature, hard-working, strong, healthy, sober, mutually supportive, joyful without degenerating into rowdiness, frank, and (most important of all, perhaps) hospitable, while remaining free from the urban corruptions and moneygrubbing spirit of more developed civilizations. This was helped by the even distribution of property, without extremes of wealth or poverty, and good relations between local government, landowners and tenants. It was all summed up, with pointed symbolism, by the comparison between the 'tousled nymphs ofSomosierra', on the Castilian side of the mountain passes which Jed to the Basque paradise, who demanded 'one and sometimes two reales for a glass of cloudy water', and the Guipuzcoan village in which 'a chorus of clean and graceful girls competed for the pleasure ... of offering generous glasses of crystal water to the travellers'. In Somosierra even water had become a commodity; in Guipuzcoa it was offered disinterestedly as a duty ofhospitality. The Guipuzcoans displayed, in short, all the virtues which were often ascribed to mountain peasantries in nineteenth-century Europe, and which were often regarded as northern virtues. They were also fertile soil for the development of a tourist industry; and the central theme of this chapter is the changing
relationship between tourism and representations of Basque identity in its Guipuzcoan form, and specifically the contradictions which emerged as Basque identities were adapted for the tourist industry in the provincial capital of San Sebastian, which became Spain's leading pre-Civil War seaside resort, while from the tum of the century the new Basque nationalisms were repudiating the cosmopolitanism, sinfulness and servility which they associated with the tourist economy. Conflicts around this theme gathered momentum in several revealing guises between the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War at the start of the holiday season in July 1936.4
Madrazo developed his ideas about Guipuzcoan character at unusual length, but they were part of a more general Spanish fashion of the 1840s for idealizing the Basque provinces in general, and singling out Guipuzcoa in particular: the other provinces, Vizcaya, Alava and Navarra, had a lower profile in this literature. It had not always been thus, as Julio Caro Baroja has pointed out: the characteristics ascribed to the Basques in the seventeenth century were a less appealing mixture of straightforwardness, lack of verbal or conceptual dexterity, neatness and accuracy as copyists, seafaring abilities, love of wine and tendency to drunkenness, and an angry, arrogant disposition. Their enemies accused them of traitorous behaviour, smuggling and witchcraft. Baroja notes, by contrast, the nineteenth-century arrival of 'an epoch in which the Basque is presented by apologists as a pacific, idyllic creature', and comments in a cynical but neatly-observed aside that 'this representation is the most useful for attracting tourists'. The English folklorist Rodney Gallop made similar points in 1930, blaming the advent of this 'romantic' period of seeing the Basques as 'the romantic scions of a doomed and dying race' on 'that monster of inaccuracy Augustin Chaho' in 1835. He sowed the seed which 'was to bear such meretricious fruit. The novelists stepped in and consecrated the legend; tourist agencies, compilers of guide-books and managers of Syndicats d'Initiative propagated and exploited it; generations of tourists swallowed (and continue to swallow) it whole. ' 5 In the late 1840s we are close to the origins of this transformation. Pascual Madoz, compiling material for the ninth volume of his monumental geographical dictionary of Spain, had already commented on the Guipuzcoans' affability and courtesy, their disposition to honour and oblige everyone (but especially strangers, whom they treated with the greatest generosity), their abhorrence of crime and respect for the law, and their piety.6 At about the same time Ramon de Navarrete (whose long journalistic career as 'Asmodeo' of Madrid's La Epoca was to keep the province in the limelight) also praised the Guipuzcoans for their affability, the measured moderation of their words (their lips were never sullied by the gross oaths which prevailed elsewhere), their industry and their exact attention to duty; and he contrasted these traits with the surly unhelpfulness of Castilians and MadrilefiosJ
These were external perceptions of this northern provi:lce, from elsewhere in Spain. They built on existing notions of the Basques as honest, industrious and clannish, which had been nourished for at least two or three generations by the significant numbers of Basques who had made headway in Madrid as merchants, bankers, professionals and members of the state bureaucracy. Here, admittedly, the clannishness was perhaps more to the fore than the other characteristics, as those established in the capital encouraged connections from their patria chica to join them and share the spoils of patronage to which they had access.8 Other northern groups, especially Cantabrians from the neighbouring Santander province, were also prominent in the capital, and it was in these regions and, of course, in Catalufia that such commercial and industrial development as nineteenth-century Spain experienced was overwhelmingly concentrated.9
