Shacks in the Uretamendi district of Bilbao, circa 1959

Until the last quarter of the 19th century, the Basque Country was a place of emigration as a lack of resources forced people to emigrate to the cities, other parts of Spain, or the colonies. Then, industrialization turned the region, and especially Vizacaya and Gipúzkoa, into the destination for a growing number of immigrants. 

This development had a number of effects, but the most significant was the growing demand for housing. Almost overnight, some cities and small towns found themselves surrounded by mines, factories and workshops employing thousands of workers who needed homes for themselves and their families. Until the Civil War, the solution to this problema was increasing urban density and a process of urbanization around those workplaces. Many companies even built housing for their workers. 

From the end of the 1940s, and especially during the 1950s, this response became inadequate. During the 1950s, the population of Vizacaya grew by 32 percent, 185,195 people. Even though the housing stock was increasing, it was woefully inadequate. Immigrant workers responded by building their own homes, at first with whatever materials they had on hand, but they soon organized themselves into neighbourhoods with houses built out of more solid materials. Bilbao - and other large cities like Madrid and Barcelona - found itself surrounded by shanty towns. Appropriately, the Spanish word, chabola, comes from the Basque word for shack: txabola. In 1955, Bilbao had 842 txabolas; in 1961, there were almost 5,000. 

The problem with these shacks, especially in Bilbao, was the terrain.  Unlike Madrid, which was flat, in Bilbao, these shanty towns were built on the slopes of the nearby mountains: Uretamendi, shown in the photograph, Banderas, Peñascal, and Monte Caramelo. 

The solution of the Franco government was to launch a housing program to eliminate the shanties. One of the best known was the creation of a new district, the Planned Town of Ocharcoaga. The idea was to eliminate the problem with the stroke of a pen. Between May 1960 and June 1961, entire shanty towns, including one in a rundown area of the port in the central city where the Guggenheim Museum now stands, were bulldozed so that a district with 3,600 dwellings could be built. This new housing was less a real solution to the problema than an act of propaganda to improve the regime’s image. 

EAO/UB/MJV