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| Barrika´s church |
The municipality of Barrika offers spectacular coastal landscapes, edged by the Cantabrian coastline and a line of peaks formed by Mounts Gane and Kurtzio. On one side, these mountains slope down towards Sopelana and Urduliz and on the other, towards Txipio on the banks of the Butrón estuary. The line of cliffs is broken, forming three beautiful beaches, each one with its own particular appeal. These have made Barrika famous as the ideal place for leisure and sports activities, especially for surfing.
The numerous archaeological sites to be found in the area demonstrate that Barrika has been populated since ancient times. In addition to agricultural and livestock breeding, the inhabitants of this area also engaged in whale hunting over a period of many hundreds of years, forming part of the Seamen’s Brotherhood of Plentzia. |
The special geographical features of the town, with its long coastline and numerous rivers, provided the ideal conditions for a number of human settlements, scattered throughout the municipality, to the extent that we cannot speak about a town centre as such, as not even the urban centre of Elexalde has a sizeable population. In order to take maximum advantage of the agricultural and livestock resources of the area, its inhabitants have traditionally lived together in small hamlets, and this organisational model has passed down over the generations to our day.
The “anteiglesia”, or hamlet, of Barrika is considered to be one of the oldest in Bizkaia. In one of the walls of today’s parish church, you can see a beautiful Romanesque window, remnant of the original church. |
Towns
