The Town Community of Lea Ibarra - Munitibar - Aulesti - Gizaburuaga - Amoroto - Mendexa

• Commonwealth
• The beginning
• Chronology
• Services
• Contractor Profile

The Town Community of Lea Ibarra - Beginning

In around 1970, many young people who had to emigrate outside the valley in order to find a job, started to claim life for small towns, and provoked a sudden, dynamic and passionate movement.

When the so-called Groups for the Promotion of Lea Ibarra were created, the decadence of the five towns constituting the valley was apparent: they were more and more abandoned, and they had no relationship whatsoever with each other.

These Promotion Groups had enormous importance, as they made fundamental contributions in organization, coordination and planning (for instance, the creation of the Training plan and the Lealde and Herriola cooperatives).

With regard to planning, we must mention the Parents´ Associations of Lea and their Coordinator, as they were the defenders and promoters of the movement during Franco´s dictatorship; they were essential to overcome the difficulties for dinamization characteristic of that period. They were the legal defenders and promoters of the time, and thanks to them some activities spread to the whole region. For example:

• - Discussions and cultural weeks
• - Papers and analyses on democratic general and local elections.
• - A plan to recover education in Basque.

Thanks to this movement, the Lea inhabitants were able to look at the future in a more optimistic way, and to organise a general plan for the region. The following date from that period:

• - An analysis of the region´s needs and a proposal to find solutions.
• - A pre-proposal about industrial infrastructures.
• - the idea of Lea Ibarra town community, proposed as an alternative to the tendency towards annexation which was dominant at the time.

When democracy arrived, towns took on those programmes and ideas, and those who designed them became members of the councils, which had a decissive impact on their policy.