A trip to Guernica with the Spanish students

At the Instituto Hemingway, we don´t just want our students to learn the Spanish language, but also to discover Spanish culture. As well as visiting the best-known sights of the Basque Country, we also make trips to its fascinating hidden corners.

One of the most spell-binding cultural sites is the little town of Guernica (Gernika in the Basque language), which is an hour-long train ride away from Bilbao. On the 13th of September, a group of eight students went to explore this famous Basque town.
Guernica is situated in the province of Vizcaya, in the Autonomous Community of the Basque Country. Outside of the Basque Country, Guernica is well-known as the town that was bombed by the Luftwaffe on the 26th April 1937.

First, the students visited the Peace Museum (museo de la paz), in the centre of the town. The interior of the museum is very modern, offering a number of interactive exhibitions, all centred around the question of “what is peace?”. The students´ favourite exhibition was a simulation in a dark room, in which you could hear a woman talking about her experience of the 1937 bombing. The peals of the clock, the sirens and the explosions gave all of the students goosebumps. The exhibitions were very intense, since they represented the destruction of the city, but the museum deals with this delicate topic in a highly sensitive way.
Afterwards, we went to the Casa de Juntas, where the Juntas del Señorio de Vizcaya take place. The most important feature of this place is “the tree”, which can be found inside the railings of the Casa de Juntas. The current tree is a cutting of the original tree which was planted in 2005 because the original tree was dying. The original tree, which is surrounded by Greek columns, survived the 1937 bombing and even today symbolizes the perseverance and reconstruction of the city.
We finished our trip with a visit the ceramic wall, in which you can see a replica of Picasso´s famous work, “Gernika” (the original is in the Queen Sofia museum in Madrid), and which the students found highly interesting.

Thanks to the Instituto Hemingway, we could learn more about the history of teh Basque Country, in this beautiful Little town of Guernica.