ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief presentation of the human geography of the Basque Country. The Basque Country, or Euskadi, straddles the western Pyrenees and is situated on Europe’s Atlantic shore along the Bay of Biscay. According to radical Basque nationalists, it includes lands along the French and Spanish slopes of the western Pyrenees and the eastern portion of the Bay of Biscay. According to the Spanish Constitution, only one-third of this area, its western region (Biskaia, Gipuzkoa and Araba) forms the “Autonomous Basque Community.” Biskaia, Gipuzkoa and Araba have more than two million inhabitants. The south-eastern Basque area, the former Kingdom of Navarra with 610,000 inhabitants, is part of Spain. The north-eastern Basque area, with 260,000 inhabitants, is French territory. Everyone speaks Spanish in Biskaia, Gipuzkoa, Araba and Navarra. A large minority also speak the Basque language, Euskera, a non Indo-European tongue that is grammatically different from all other known languages.
