Our Spanish course pupils visit Guernica

This August we have done many activities with our students. One of our trips involved an excursion to Guernica. We went with Borja, one of the Instituto Hemingway teachers.

We took the train and after a journey of 40 minutes, we arrived in this small town in the Basque Country steeped in history. First of all we visited the Casa de Juntas( the General Assembly), the headquarters of the supreme institutional body of Bizcay, which is built near the mythical tree of Guernica(El Árbol de Guernica), the symbol of  the Basques and a meeting place of the council members of the Bizcayan upper echelon since the Middle Ages. The building, in a purely neoclassical style, was built between 1826 and 1833 under the direction of the architect Antonio de Exebarria. Up until this date, the meetings were held in the shrine of Santa María la Antigua, but it was later demolished to carry out the construction of a new building, taking the primeval church as a reference point.

What we most liked was the place where they currently hold the plenary sessions of the Bizcayan General Meetings. The room is decorated with different paintings which depict the lords of Bizcaya and it retains various elements of the ancient church, such as the altar and the fonts of holy water. Visiting this building impressed us and brought us much closer to Basque culture and history.

The next monument we visited was the Peace Museum(el Museo de la Paz), a museum dedicated entirely to this theme. The museum has two rooms about the bombing of Guernica, with photographic and audiovisual material about the war. It also has a room decorated like a house in the wartime period where you sit and listen to a voice talking about life before, during and after the war from speakers.  Instantly, the house changes with the explanation of what happened and it becomes dramatic. The account stirred up very strong feelings of compassion in all the students.

After the museum we went to eat something and just like that our excursion drew to a close.

If you want a Spanish course with free cultural activities like this do not hesitate to contact us.  

We returned to Bilbao with strong feelings and an understanding of Spanish history.