Ybarra, with a Y with two crosses: Bilbao and Seville
One Ybarra was mayor of Seville and another mayor of Bilbao. The two cities united by this last name, represented by the two crosses of that exotic letter of the alphabet that became Sevillian in 1842, when the company Hijos de Ybarra was created, and even more so in 1846, when the Bilbao-born José María Ybarra y Gutiérrez de Caviedes (1816-1878) founded the April Fair in Seville with the Catalan Narciso Bonaplata. Javier de Ybarra y Bergé (1913-1977) was mayor of Bilbao between 1963 and 1969. On June 25, 1977, the first Copa del Rey was played at the Vicente Calderón. It was disputed by Betis and Athletic Bilbao. The first won on penalties. There would be Ybarras from Betis and Ybarras from Bilbao. Three days before that final, on June 22, 1977, just one week after the first democratic elections called by Adolfo Suárez, the body of Ybarra and Bergé was found “near the Rekarte hamlet, a refuge for mountaineers in the Alto of Barazar”, reads in the book broken livesof which Rogelio Alonso, Florencio Domínguez and Marcos García Rey are authors.
It is chronologically the first fatality of ETA in a democracy. Four terrorists disguised as nurses entered the family home of this businessman on May 20, 1977, a few days before the election campaign began. They handcuffed all of his children, according to the account of one of them, Javier Ybarra Ybarra, in the book We the Ybarras. He recounts how shocking it was for the terrorists to enter the bedroom of the youngest of the children, Cosme, fifteen years old, and find an ikurriña and a poster of Che Guevara. They put the industrialist in a Seat 124 camouflaged as an ambulance. They had been threatening him for more than ten years to make him pay the revolutionary tax, which he always refused.
The Ybarra mayor of Seville knew the First Republic. The Ybarra mayor of Bilbao was the second. In 1934 he finished his law studies, which he did between Deusto and Salamanca. His son Javier Ybarra Ybarra is the author of the prologue to the book by historian Clara Zamora Meca The Ybarra women. nest and knotin which he writes that “the civil war took the life of 43 Ybarras ahead”.
The arrival of the surname in Seville is preceded by political ups and downs. “Sevilla owes General Espartero the presence of the Ybarras in their city,” writes Javier Ybarra in said prologue. José Antonio Ybarra surely encouraged his children to leave Bilbao immediately when Espartero, Duke of Victoria in the street map of Seville, besieged and bombarded the Bilbao capital. To the third of his children, José María, it seemed to him that he would move to Seville.
The murdered Ybarra was the great-grandson of Juan, the eldest of the children, who stayed in Bilbao. José María Ybarra did comply with his father’s order, he traveled to Seville and in Cádiz he met Dolores González Álvarez, the daughter of an Indian. They were married in April 1843 in Seville. On a honeymoon they arrived by stagecoach to Bilbao. They celebrated Narváez’s triumph and learned that Espartero was bombing Seville. In the first Fair, that of 1847, the third of his children was born.
“pains the first ship with which the cabotage between Seville and Bilbao began was called”, writes Clara Zamora in her book on the Ybarra. “José María Ybarra named the sailboat that would unite the city he picked up to live like this, in honor of his wife and the one that saw him born”. The one from the Nervión estuary with the one from the Nervión neighbourhood. In this book appears a photograph of María Teresa Ybarra Villabaso, wife of the politician kidnapped and murdered by ETA, with two of her children. Her death in 1975, two years before the kidnapping and murder of her husband, he freed her from suffering that ordeal. broken lives its authors write that “when the head of the commando showed his victim that it was time to leave, Javier de Ybarra addressed his children: ‘Don’t worry about me. The most they will be able to do is shoot me and, In that case, I will go to meet your mother in heaven.”
He is kidnapped ten days before the electoral campaign begins and his body is found a week after the elections. 33 days of suffering. On June 2, 1977, twenty days before the consummation of the crime, Miguel Ángel Apalategui was arrested in Hendaye, suspected of having ordered the kidnapping. On June 13, the Ybarra family received an ultimatum in which they set the deadline to receive the ransom at 12 at night on June 15, the day of the elections.
The Ybarras always got up. Neither he paid the revolutionary tax nor his family the ransom. In the Sevillian branch, with 180 years of presence in the city, it overcame the fire that completely destroyed the Hijos de Ybarra oil and derivatives factory in Dos Hermanas in July 2016. A surname present in all the prominent sectors of the city, with a booth at a Fair that has completed 175 years of history with that Y as a symbol, two arms, that of Bilbao and that of Seville.