Guernica

Guernica (Basque: Gernika) is a town in the province of Bizkaia in the Basque Country. It is historically the symbolic capital of the Basque people: the Casa de Juntas, a neo-classical assembly house, stands beside the Gernikako Arbola, the sacred oak tree under whose predecessor Basque lords swore to uphold the traditional rights and liberties of the Basque people.

On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the town was subjected to sustained aerial bombardment by Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion and Fascist Italy’s Aviazione Legionaria in support of Franco’s forces. The attack, which killed hundreds of civilians, became one of the defining atrocities of twentieth-century European history and inspired Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica, now in the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid.

The town today is a centre of Basque cultural and political identity, with the Casa de Juntas, the surviving oak, and a peace museum among its principal landmarks. For pilgrims on the Camino del Norte, Guernica is a historically charged stage with full services.