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Zumarraga Town Hall

Coat of arms of Zumarraga
Zumarraga.net

Zumarraga [History]

Statue of Legazpi

The earliest data on Zumarraga appear in 1366 when the pretender Henry, who was fighting in the bloody civil war halfway through the 14th century against his half brother, King Peter I, donated the monastery of Zumarraga to the Lord of Lazcano. Subsequently, in a desire to escape the strict control to which this Feudal Lord had subjected the settlers in this area, on December 11th, 1383, a covenant of concord was signed with the recently established town of Urretxu in Urrutia, which was located in what is known today as the neighbourhood of Eitza. This covenant was confirmed by John II in 1385 and ratified by Henry III. In 1405, however, these agreements were declared null and void and it was decreed that the two municipalities should belong to the neighbourhood of Segura, to which Zumarraga remained attached until 1411. On an unspecified date it joined the Areria “Alcaldía Mayor” (something like “Borough Council”), where it remained until 1660. In 1661 Zumarraga was designated a town.

Zumarraga was originally a settlement consisting of dispersed nuclei, scattered farms around the Parish Church, which was known as St. Mary of Zumarraga –later popularly known as “Antio” or “La Antigua”–. As the years passed, from the end of the 15th century onwards, the settlement gradually began to establish itself closer to the river and created an “urban” with Eizaga at its centre. The fact that the Parish Church was still located in the mountains led to a request during the second third of the 16th century to the ecclesiastical authorities that the Parish Church be located at the bottom of the valley, and this entailed a transfer or new location.

Key dates in the municipality are: 1526, the first Municipal Bylaws; 1860, the first Distribution Plan by the Architect Estibanz; 1865, the establishing of the fortnightly market on Thursdays, which now takes place every week and is held on Saturdays in the Euskadi Square and which is a showcase for the agricultural products of the “baserritarras” or farmers of the area; 1866, the inauguration of the new Town Hall, which was refurbished in 1986 on the basis of innovative aesthetic criteria; 1875, the inauguration of the new Cemetery, which in 1984 was redesigned with a Crypt; 1901, a mains water supply was first introduced; 1930, the establishing of the Esteban Orbegozo S. A. company in the town, which meant the creation of many jobs and a high level of immigration in the 1950s when the population soared. It increased fourfold until it peaked in 1977 with a population of 12,619 inhabitants. The subsequent economic crisis altered the trend and signalled the start of emigration, which was greater than the natural population growth and this reduced the number of inhabitants to today’s 10,324.

A separate mention should be made of the railway as a key element in the history of Zumarraga, because at one point the town went as far as having three different stations. The Ferrocarril del Norte (today RENFE, the Spanish State railways) was opened in 1864 and ran the Madrid-Paris line; the Ferrocarriles Vascongados railway was inaugurated in 1889 and was responsible for the Zumarraga-Malzaga line; and finally, in 1926, the Ferrocarril del Urola, known affectionately in Basque as “Gure trena” (Our Train), which ran the Zumarraga-Zumaia service. This fact, recorded allegorically in a sculpture by Vicente Larrea (1986) located in the Town Hall, turned the town into one of the most important centres of communications of the Vascongadas or Basque provinces, when it linked the Castilian Plain with the coast of Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia. Today only the RENFE service operates.

Zumarraga was the birthplace of Miguel López de Legazpi, who colonized the Philippines in the 16th century. His statue has been presiding over the main square of the town since 1897 and the house where he was born, known as the “Casa-Torre de Legazpi” in Spanish or the “Jauregi Haundia” in Basque, has been preserved in a redesigned state.

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