Durango audiotours

On March 31, 1937, German Condor Legion aircraft and Italian Aviazione Legionaria bombed Durango. More than 500 people died in the attack and the days that followed, many of them civilians. It was the first mass bombing of an open city in Western European history - not Guernica, which followed on April 26, but Durango, six weeks earlier. Guernica became Picasso's painting and the symbol of the war. Durango became, largely, a footnote. The town rebuilt itself and keeps this history without dramatizing it.

Durango sits in the Durangaldea comarca of Biscay, in a valley ringed by mountains that includes Anboto, sacred in Basque mythology as the home of Mari, the goddess of the land.

Three rivers cross through the municipality, with the Ibaizabal as the principal waterway. The Kurutziaga Cross, carved in the late 15th or early 16th century in a Gothic style that has no clear Castilian parallel, stands on the outskirts of the town as evidence of how long Durango was making its own things in its own language.