El Correo (Spanish for "The Courier") is the leading
daily newspaper in Bilbao
and the
Basque Country
of northern Spain
. Its
circulation, over 119,000, is the seventh-highest among general
interest newspapers in Spain.
History
The brothers Ybarra y de la Revilla brothers –Fernando, Gabriel and
Emilio– founded
El Pueblo Vasco ("The Basque People") on
May 1,
1910, with Juan de
la Cruz as founding editor.
The paper supported Vizcaya's young Conservative Party and its
editorial line was clerical, Alfonsist monarchist, free press and Basque regional
autonomist. The paper's chief competitor in Bilbao was
La Gaceta del
Norte.
Due to these conservative stances,
El Pueblo Vasco was
shut down by the
Spanish Republic
government on
July 17,
1936, just before the
Spanish Civil War. It was almost a year
later,
July 6,
1937, when
the paper published again, after the fall of Bilbao; it was joined
on newsstands by
El Correo Español, the official newspaper
of the
Falange
Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, the Spanish
fascist party, using the seized presses of the
Basque nationalist daily
Euzkadi .
By order of dictator
Francisco
Franco's government on
April 13,
1938, the two papers combined as
El Correo
Español-El Pueblo Vasco, owned by El Pueblo Vasco S.A. but
controlled by the Falange. During the first 15 years of Franco's
regime,
El Correo acquired its competitors
El
Noticiero Bilbaíno (1939) and
El Diario Vasco (1945).
Upon this last purchase, the company's name was changed to Bilbao
Editorial S.A.
The year 1965 saw
El Correo move to its current offices in
Calle Pintor Losada, convert to
tabloid
format and increase the number of pages. In 1976,
El
Correo for the first time surpassed
La Gaceta del
Norte in sales, becoming the best-selling newspaper in
northern Spain.
Also around this time, publisher Javier de Ybarra y Bergé was
kidnapped and murdered by
ETA, a Basque
nationalist terrorist organisation.
El Correo was the original promoter of
La Vuelta, the yearly bicycle race around
Spain . However, due to ETA's threats, it was decades ago that
La Vuelta passed through the Basque Country.
The 1980s
brought geographic expansion, as El Correo began to
publish editions outside the Bilbao metro area and so it purchased
El Diario
Montañés, a newspaper in Santander
. The paper now publishes nine local editions:
five within the province of Vizcaya, which
includes Bilbao, and one each serving the provinces of Álava
, Guipúzcoa
(sharing territory with El Diario Vasco),
Burgos
(in the city of Miranda de Ebro
) and La Rioja
.
El Correo,
El Diario Vasco and
El Diario
Montañés are now published by
Grupo
Vocento, a nationwide communications company.Vocento also
acquired
ABC from
Madrid.
The daily comic strip
Don Celes
(by
Luis del Olmo,
originally published in
La Gaceta del Norte) is now a
symbol of the newspaper.
References
External links
Wikis
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