Building A Kingdom Outpost

I first crossed paths with Joseba Attard in 2003, though briefly. He had travelled to Washington State as a translator for a group of Basque students taking part in a month-long English immersion home stay program. During that July, the students attended a Young Life Camp, and Joseba was there to translate. It was important to us that the young people had the opportunity to hear the Bible and the Gospel story in Euskara — even while they were enrolled in an English immersion program. Their language, their faith, their identity: these things mattered, and Joseba understood that instinctively. We met, we talked, and I sensed in him a man shaped by something deeper than circumstance. But life moves on, and years passed.

Then in 2009 I travelled to the Basque Country with a team, visiting Catholic schools, ikastolas, and English tutoring schools — giving presentations and inviting students to come to the Pacific Northwest for a month-long English immersion stay with an American family. When I arrived in Elorrio, I walked through the door of an English school run by Joseba and his English wife Joanna, and our brief 2003 acquaintance became something else entirely. I encountered two people of extraordinary passion. For life. For the Basque culture. For their faith in Jesus. I left Elorrio having made friends I knew would matter.

I had no idea then just how much they would matter, or how deep the story would go. In the years that followed, I would return to the Basque Country again and again — sometimes with a team of volunteers, sometimes with a group of travelers, always drawn back by the same conviction that what the Attards were building at Olabe was something worth supporting with more than words.

The Decision That Changed Everything

In 2016, Joseba and Joanna made a decision. They were going to purchase a 450-year-old Basque farmhouse — a baserri — in Bedarona, in the hills above the coastal village of Ea in Bizkaia. They were going to restore it. They were going to make it live again.

When they told me, I was immediately and completely interested in helping them see it through. I have written elsewhere about what the etxe — the Basque house — represents in this culture. It is not property. It is a living entity, a continuity stretching between the dead and the living, an obligation carried from generation to generation. The Basques did not live in their houses; they lived as their houses. What the Attards were taking on at Olabe was not a renovation project. It was a vocation. And I could see that clearly from the moment they described it.

That same year I travelled to Olabe for the first time and stayed in the yurt the Attards had set up on the land. They themselves were living in a converted chicken coop — the family home while the farmhouse waited. There were a couple of damp rooms in the old building that could shelter someone for a brief stay, and that was about it. The farmhouse was raw, cold, and magnificent. The land around it — twenty hectares of pasture and ancient forest with the sea somewhere beyond the treeline — felt like the kind of place that asks something of you. I also had friends back in Washington who had hosted Basque students through the immersion program and were deeply interested in what the Attards were building. This was going to be a community effort.

Years of Showing Up

In 2017 I brought a group back to Olabe for a working week. We cleared rubbish, moved a large woodpile, and worked around the farm. It was physical, unglamorous, and exactly right. Later that same year, funds came together to install the huge beams and put on a new roof — a turning point in the life of the building.

In October 2018 I came again with another team. This time we focused on the bottom portion of the farmhouse — the traditional space where sheep would shelter through the winter months — clearing it out and making it usable. We took a walk-behind field mower to the tall grass in the fields and installed fence posts to enclose a grazing area for sheep. The land was beginning to come back into use.

In 2019 I brought a construction contractor and his architect wife from Washington State to explore how they might help with the design and construction work. They caught the vision immediately. That visit led to them returning with a team from Washington who spent ten days laying sub-flooring for the second story of the farmhouse. I worked my social network back home, securing funding for a long series of smaller projects — the kind of work that does not make headlines but without which nothing large ever gets finished.

Each time I came to Olabe, the same man was there working. Sometimes with helpers, sometimes alone, sometimes just dropping by to hang around. His name was Julen Iturraspe, and he had come originally to do the electrical work.

Something the Attards told me early on has stayed with me through all of these visits. They were clear-eyed about it: outsiders will only have a meaningful impact in furthering the Gospel message in the Basque Country to the degree that they learn Euskara and genuinely become part of the Basque community. Even then, they said, that impact will never be as deep or as lasting as what comes from a Basque person speaking to their own people. It is not a discouraging thought — it is an honest one, and it reframes everything. Our role, as outsiders, is to serve and support. To clear rubbish, move woodpiles, lay floors, and raise funds. To show up. The message itself travels best through Basque hands, Basque voices, Basque lives — people like Julen, who carries his culture in his body and his faith in his community.

The Electrician from Urtza

Julen lives in Urtza Auzoa, the hamlet just up the track from Olabe — a neighbourhood so close you could call between them. He had been hired as a tradesman to handle the wiring of the old farmhouse, and he did that job with the quiet competence of someone who knows the land he is working on and takes it seriously. But somewhere between the first visit and the many that followed, something shifted. He and the Attards became friends. He kept coming back, not always because there was a specific task but because Olabe had become, in some way, his project too.

I watched this happen over several years, and I think I understand why. What the Attards are doing at Olabe is not simply restoring a building. They are recovering a way of being — rooted in the land, rooted in Basque culture, rooted in a faith that takes the physical world seriously. Julen recognized that. A man who has devoted himself to keeping the old rural sports alive knows something about the importance of refusing to let things disappear.

Because Julen Iturraspe is a founder and central figure of Urtza Herri Kirol Kluba — the rural sports club formally registered in April 2020 at Urtza Auzoa 6, Ea, recognized by the Basque Government’s sports authority under registration number CD0006946. His discipline is Herri Kirolak: the traditional Basque rural sports that were born directly from centuries of baserri labour. Stone lifting (harrijasotzea). Log cutting with axe (aizkolaritza). Rock drilling (barrenadoreak). Log sawing. Sack carrying. Tug of war (sokatira). Txinga carrying. Cart lifting. Twenty-one disciplines in all, each one a physical memory of the work that once defined this landscape and these people.

As Julen came to understand what the Attards were building at Olabe, he grew genuinely fond of it. He recognised a shared seriousness about keeping Basque culture alive not as performance but as practice. And that recognition opened a door.

A Morning with the Stones

In 2022 I brought a group to the Basque Country — a tour of the region that included several days walking the Camino. We spent a few days at Olabe, and it was during that stay that I asked Joseba to invite Julen and his club members to come to Olabe for a demonstration.

He said yes.

Olabe, Ea — Summer 2022. Members of the Urtza Herri Kirol Kluba demonstrate traditional log-sawing. The club vest bears the Urtza Herri Kirol Taldea crest.

What happened that day is one of my favorite memories from many years of traveling to and writing about the Basque Country. Julen and his team arrived with their tools and their stones and their easy, unshowy expertise, and they gave us something far better than a demonstration. They gave us a lesson. They handed us the axes. They showed us how to stand over a stone — feet planted wide, back straight, the body becoming a frame — and then the extraordinary technique of rolling the stone up along the body to the shoulder, using momentum and leverage rather than brute strength alone. They walked us through the technique of each discipline, corrected our grip, laughed at our early attempts, and cheered our improvements. My group had a wonderful time — and more than that, they left with something they had not expected: a felt sense of what this landscape has always asked of its people.

I have written about how the ancient Basque spiritual world survived Christianization not by retreating but by embedding itself in practice — in the rhythms of the farming year, in the devotional geography of hilltop shrines, in the way certain places still provoke a quality of reverence that people cannot quite explain. Herri Kirolak belongs to that same continuum. It is culture carried in the body when the written record runs thin. The man who lifts a 100-kilogram stone in competition is doing something his great-great-grandfather did before the cows needed feeding on a cold Bizkaia morning. When Julen placed those tools in our hands, something of that long memory passed between us — and I do not think that is a small thing.

It was, in the truest Basque sense, auzolan — communal work freely given, rooted in nothing more complicated than the fact of being neighbours and caring about the same things.

Two Projects, One Community

What moves me most about the relationship between Olabe and Urtza Herri Kirol Kluba is that nobody planned it. It was not a partnership brokered by a cultural foundation or a heritage grant. It grew from a working relationship — an electrician hired for a job, a friendship that outlasted the contract, a recognition between people who happen to care about the same things.

Julen did not join a cultural program. He came to wire a house, found kindred spirits, and eventually brought his club — and the living memory it carries — to share with whoever happened to be at Olabe that day. That is how transmission actually works in the Basque Country. Not through institutions, but through people. Not through declarations, but through practice. Through an axe placed in a willing hand, and someone patient enough to show you how to use it.

Neither project is finished. Olabe continues to grow, its reputation spreading by word of mouth among the kind of travelers who are looking for something more than a bed. Urtza Herri Kirol Kluba, founded only in 2020, is still young — still building, still deepening its roots. But their connection is already real, already bearing fruit in the form of shared days and the particular kind of knowledge that can only pass from hand to hand.

I keep coming back to something I have written about the etxe: that it was never a monument, always a process — each generation a temporary custodian of something ancient and ongoing. Julen Iturraspe and Joseba and Joanna Attard, from their different starting points and in their different ways, seem to understand this in their bones. They are doing something quietly extraordinary in the hills above Ea. They are keeping the old weight off the ground.

One lift at a time.

Eskerrik asko ta ikusi arte. Thank you, and until we see each other again.

Olabe is located at Olabe Auzoa 6, Bedarona-Ea, Bizkaia. For more information visit olabe.eu.