Ezkio
, also called , now , is a small town, part of the municipality of since 1965, now , in the Spanish province of or , in the autonomous community of the Basque Country. It is most famous for alleged Marian apparitions, controversial public visions of the Virgin Mary starting in 1931. Location Ezquioga is a dispersed farming township located at Latitude 43° 4' 60N, Longitude 2° 16' 0W, at an altitude of 555 meters above sea level, in the Goiherri region. There are no large cities nearby; Zumarraga, Spain, a nearby town, had a population of 10,265 in 2000. The Visions Background On April 14, 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was declared after anti-monarchist candidates won elections in urban areas throughout Spain, King Alfonso XIII of Spain abdicated. Many of the new government were Socialist or otherwise anti-clerical. However this did not spread to the religious Basque Country. In the elections on June 28, rightist coalitions won handily in Gipuzkoa and Navarra. On April 23, 1931, children playing in Torralba de Aragón, in Huesca, saw and heard what they thought was the figure of the Virgin Mary inside the church, saying "Do not mistreat my son.". Catholic newspapers reported this vision throughout Spain. The child seers of Ezkioga allegedly read the Basque version in Argia, on May 5, 1931. On June 4, 12 girls and a boy, between 9 and 14 years old, saw an "unearthly" woman in mourning accompanied by a bright light in a church in the Basque town of Mendigorría. Ezquioga visions On 29 June 1931, a brother and sister of the Bereciartua family, ages 7 and 11, monolingual Basque speakers, claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary clad in a black mantle on a hillside known as Anduaga, which lay above a church and school in Ezquioga. Their own father did not believe them, but hundreds of others came to the hillside to see for themselves. Eventually, hundreds of thousands of mostly Basque devotees came to Ezquioga expecting to witness and perhaps even experience visions, and hundreds did. On the nights of July 12, 16, and 18, and October 16, up to eighty thousand persons turned out. In the first month there were over a hundred alleged seers. Occasional visions continued until the fall of 1933. Seers described blinding light, convulsed, many fell unconscious, and some bled. In 1933, bleeding crucifixes were reported around Ezquioga, seemingly as a retort to negative reports about the visionaries. Reactions Many rightist Basque nationalists, preparing for a civil war against the Republic, supported the visionaries, believing the visions were a sign that the Virgin Mary supported them. It also draw a certain amount of attention among the Catholics of Catalonia. The official church, on the other hand, soon turned against the seers. At the invitation of the diocese, Jose Antonio Laburu, a Jesuit, preached against the "mental contagion" of the Ezquioga visions at San Sebastian in April and June 1932, contrasting them against the "true" visions of Teresa of