José de Arteche
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José de Arteche Aramburu (12 March 1906 – 23 September 1971) was a Basque writer and biographer, almost always credited as José de Arteche. The Basque form of his name is Jose Artetxe Aranburu.
Born in Azpeitia, Gipuzkoa, in 1906, Arteche was bilingual in Basque and Spanish. He wrote about the Spanish Civil War and a number of biographies, including lives of Saint Cyran and Lope de Aguirre, a 16th-century Basque conquistador active in South America.[1]
The child of a Carlist couple who ran the Arteche Inn at Azpeitia, there Arteche met Doña Isabel, the sister of Alfonso XII, Antoine d'Abbadie, a patron of Basque literature, and Benito Pérez Galdós.[2]
Basque was Arteche's mother tongue, and from an early age he was fond of reading. He was educated by French nuns at the Notre Dame school in Azpeitia and then by the Marist Brothers, where he made a friend for life, Inazio Eizmendi Manterola, who also became a writer.[2]
