Biography of Luis. Arana y Goiri

Basque nationalist politician and, along with his brother Sabino Arana, first theoretician of rising Basque nationalism. His father, Santiago spider and Ausotegui, owner of a shipyard on the banks of the Nervion river, was a prominent militant Carlist which, because of its direct intervention in the Carlist War III (1872-76), had to take refuge in the South of France. In the year 1876, both brothers were able to return to Bilbao, after which entered the Jesuit College of OrduÃ±a, for high school. Thanks to his great power of persuasion, Luis convinced his brother Sabino to abandon the Carlist party. By that time she had formed a political awareness of extreme nationalist-minded, as you can see in the publication of the essay principles of primitive Basque nationalism, work in which the author said clearly “Vizcaya is not Spain”.

8 June the year 1893, Luis Arana founded the monthly magazine Bizkaitarra, which developed its nationalist doctrine and which carried on their front pages the motto God and old laws as unequivocal sign of deeply nationalist political identity with his brother. Both brothers founded, the following year, the first nationalist organization, Euskaldun Batzojika, by way of the circle Basque to direct, at the local level, political and cultural action of nationalism. This organization was intended to bring together the greatest possible number of Basques within a single political system that respected religion, language and Basque traditional laws, and, at the same time, it sought to maintain as far as possible the ethnic characteristics of his people.

On April 5, 1895, the magazine founded by the two brothers was closed definitely by the central Government in Madrid due to its increasingly more pronounced nationalistic doctrine of cutting extreme, riddled with racist and xenophobic connotations. Although the
increasing importance of his brother Sabino in the gestation of the Basque nationalism placed him at a political level second, Luis Arana tirelessly continued its task as a thinker and political ideologue, culminating in the year 1898, when both brothers, leaders of the newly created Partido Nacionalista Vasco (PNV) (Eusko Alberdi Jeltzales), obtained a resounding success in the elections to provincial members, with a total of 4.545 votes for the party. After this triumph, Luis and Sabino founded on 4 June the year 1899, the newspaper El mail Vasco, which also ended up being closed by Royal Decree, in September of that same year.


ARANA GOIRI, Sabino: The homeland of Basques. (Donostia: Haramburu. 1995).

ARANA GOIRI, Sabino: Complete works. (Donostia: Sendoa Argitaldaria. 1980).

ELIZONDO, Mauro: Sabino Arana, father of nationalities: unpublished correspondence of the spider and Goiri brothers. 2 volumes. (Bilbao: Gran EnciclopÃ¨dia Vasca. 1981)

LARRONDE. Jean-Claude: Basque nationalism: its origin and its ideology in the work of Sabino Arana Goiri. (Donostia: Thertoa. 1977).