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Pursuits

Stone Lifting as Sport in the Basque Country

A statue of a stone lifter at Peru Harri, a farm near Leitza, Spain, that's home to a stone-lifting museum. Credit...Markel Redondo for The New York Times

It was 10 o’clock on a bright Thursday morning when I washed up in a cafe in Leitza, a Basque village in a rugged, green valley south of San Sebastián, in search of directions. The barista and both of her customers, two elderly men wearing traditional Basque berets, knew whom I was looking for before I asked. Iñaki Perurena is the Michael Jordan of harrijasotzaile, or stone lifting, considered a herri kirolak, or rural Basque sport that has been an integral part of the Basque culture for 100 years, and I had come to Leitza in search of his hilltop museum and sculpture garden dedicated to this unusual athletic pursuit.

“You have to go to the butcher shop and talk to his sister, María Jesus,” the barista said in Spanish, which is very much a second language in this bastion of Basque patriotism.

Inside the family’s small butcher shop, María Jesus made a phone call, as I examined a wall featuring photos of Iñaki and his sons lifting ungodly huge stones of various shapes and sizes. Minutes later Mr. Perurena turned up, extending one of his bearlike paws for a handshake.

Over a round of café con leche, overlooking Leitza’s handsome, Alpine-style main square, Mr. Perurena told me about the utilitarian origins of the traditional rural sports of the Basque Country.

“Basque sports come from the work that people did on Basque farms, and that work became sport,” he said.

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A view of Leitza.Credit...Markel Redondo for The New York Times

Before my first visit to the Basque Country, I familiarized myself with some of the most distinctive elements of Basque culture: pintxos (the Basque take on tapas), sagardotegis (cider houses), bertsolaris (like a Basque poetry slam), txokos (usually all-male gastronomy clubs), and, of course, the distinctive Basque language, Euskara, said to be the oldest living language in Europe.

But I was most fascinated by a small box in my guidebook describing the Basque’s peculiar rural sports — wood chopping, hay bale lifting, hay bale tossing, churn carrying, hole drilling, stone lifting and a host of others. And I found a kindred spirit in David Lachiondo, an adjunct professor of Basque Studies at Boise State University. “The Basque rural sports are kind of the equivalent of rodeo here,” he said in a telephone interview. “These sports are an integral part of the Basque identity.”

Paulo, a gregarious 30-something Basque who owns Pension Aia, our base in San Sebastián, told us that we’d just missed Kontxako Bandera, a huge rowing regatta, when we arrived in early September. But we took his recommendation to check out a youth pelota tournament that was taking place all week on a court right off 31 de Agosto Street, the principal street in San Sebastián’s old town.

Pelota is a Basque court sport with more than a dozen variations. On this bright afternoon, scores of spectators sat along the exterior walls of the court, while others looked on from the terraces of what looked like centuries-old apartment dwellings. We watched teenagers, playing in teams of two, wearing smart white uniforms with multicolored belts, smack a small but heavy white ball with their heavily taped hands off two high walls, one painted bright green, the other cinder-block gray. Teams score a point when the opposition hits the ball below the line on the front wall, fails to swat the ball back after one bounce or smacks the ball over the walls.

“In every Basque town, you will find three things,” said a man sitting next to us who was waiting for his son to compete in the tournament. “A church, a bar and a pelota court. This is our most important game.”

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A visitor practices stone lifting at Peru Harri.Credit...Markel Redondo for The New York Times

But while pelota and, to a lesser degree, jai alai, another court game that was invented by the Basques, are thriving, Mr. Perurena didn’t respond when I asked him the morning of our introduction to pelota if his own sport was still alive and well.

“Everything will make sense once we get to Peru Harri,” he said, referring to the centuries-old farm where he and his sons built their stone-lifting museum and sculpture park.

After our round of coffees, my wife and I piled in the back of Mr. Perurena’s compact S.U.V. along with Saioa Martija Gónzalez, his youngest son’s girlfriend, who had agreed to interpret, and her German shepherd, Oska (a slang term for “bite” in Basque), for the 10-minute drive to Peru Harri.

I couldn’t find any mention of Leitza in any of the guidebooks I consulted, but as Mr. Perurena steered us in and out of the town’s narrow, empty streets, I felt as if we had discovered a lost Alpine Shangri-La. Set in an alluring valley, surrounded by craggy hills in every direction, Leitza is a town of sturdy, red-roofed white-and-gray homes, each seemingly adorned with baskets of geraniums and petunias in full bloom. Colorful political graffiti demanding amnesty for Basque political prisoners and expressing support for Euskal Herria — the greater Basque nation that includes four provinces in Spain and three in France — left no doubt that Leitza is a stronghold for Basque nationalists despite its location in Navarre, just outside the technical boundary of the Basque region.

Mr. Perurena turned up a narrow one-lane track signified by a huge yellow sculpture of a hand pointing up a steep hillside outside town. We inched up the hill, rounded a corner and came upon a hilltop panorama of more arresting sculptures set against a bucolic tableau of steep hills and wild-looking horses.

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Inaxio Perurena, son of the stone-lifting legend Iñaki Perurena, trains in a garage in Leitza.Credit...Markel Redondo for The New York Times

The rolling landscape is dominated by a towering 25-foot-tall statue of a stone lifter with a massive stone resting on his shoulder. The stone lifter is surrounded by a host of other striking, surrealistic sculptures, including one of a man being impaled by a sword, another with a gigantic hand and a third shaped like a Basque beret to honor Mr. Perurena’s father, now deceased, who never left home without one. Mr. Perurena led us to a grotto of painted stones paying homage to the great Basque stone lifters who came before him over the last century.

“I had no experience making sculptures,” he said. “But this was my dream. We had to learn how to do everything.”

The Basques, Mr. Perurena said, are deeply spiritual and are strongly connected to the land. He pointed to four stones labeled with the Basque words for “water,” “fire,” “earth” and “mother earth,” to illustrate this point. Peru Harri, opened in 2009, is also a working farm with more than 70 cattle that supply the family butcher shop. Mr. Perurena leads the tours and charges a nominal 4-euro entry fee (about $5.40), which usually includes a ride there from Leitza. He bought the farm 30 years ago from a family with nine children who lived there with no running water, electricity or transportation.

“Nothing had changed here in centuries,” he said. “When we started to build here, we found an ax that turned out to be more than 1,000 years old, and nearby there are cave paintings that are supposed to be 25,000 years old.”

Mr. Perurena, 57, guided us into a restored barn to view the museum exhibits, first directing us to one advancing the theory that Basque men, many of whom are known to be thick-chested and brawny like Mr. Perurena, are direct descendants of the Cro-Magnons, who lived as much as 40,000 years ago.

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Wood chopping, one of the Basque Country's rural sports.Credit...Markel Redondo

Mr. Perurena is a butcher, a soap opera star on Basque television and, now, a tour guide. But he’s famous in these parts for his stone-lifting feats, and after watching a short film of his superhuman lifting exploits in the museum, it’s easy to see why. We watched footage of him hoisting stones that weigh more than 700 pounds; more footage where he lifted a 589-pound stone with one hand; and yet more in which he rolled a 465-pound stone around his neck 36 times in one minute. He told us that once, to celebrate the airing of the 1,700th episode of “Goenkale,” the soap opera he stars in, he lifted a 212-pound stone 1,700 times in nine hours.

“How did you feel afterward?” I asked.

“Bueno,” he said. “I could have done more.”

While showing us around, Mr. Perurena explained that sports like stone lifting, whale boat racing, wood chopping, sheep fighting and others developed and gained popularity because they involved everyday activities that farmers and fisherman needed to excel in to make a living. Stone lifting evolved into a sport over the last hundred years or so because Basque farms tend to be rocky, and farmers needed to move big boulders to work their land.

Even during the dark days of the Franco dictatorship, when it was dangerous to speak the Basque language, rural Basque sports flourished as an important part of the Basque culture, even though no one could call them “Basque sports.” And mountaineering became popular because Basques felt free to speak their own language only when they were out in rural areas with trusted friends, where there was no risk of being reported to the authorities. (There are a number of famous Basque mountaineers, including Edurne Pasaban, who was the first woman to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks.)

Today, visitors can learn about rural Basque sports at Peru Harri and see them live at town patron saint festivals all around the Basque region. Some of the most well known are the White Virgin Festival in Vitoria in early August, Semana Grande in San Sebastián and Bilbao in mid- to late August and Bayonne in late July. Americans can check out Basque sports at Basque festivals in Chino and Bakersfield, Calif., and in Elko, Nev.

And every five years, Boise hosts a huge Basque festival called Jaialdi, where one night of the celebration is devoted to Basque sports. (The next one is scheduled for July 2015.)

Mr. Perurena told us that he still trains every day but no longer competes because of arthritis and a variety of other ailments.

“After 40 years of lifting heavy stones, you have to pay the bill,” he said.

His older son, Inaxio, now 29, still competes at a high level, but he has never been able to break any of his father’s records.

“Journalists here have been asking him since he was 5 when he’s going to break my records,” Mr. Perurena lamented. “It isn’t fair.”

Our conversation swirled around to the topic of Basque independence, but Mr. Perurena didn’t want to say if he supported an independent Basque state.

“I am Basque,” he said. “And I want to be Basque. Interpret that as you like.”

Mr. Perurena told us that he created the museum to help introduce his sport to the world. But when I asked him if the sport will still be around in another 100 years, Ms. Martija Gónzalez didn’t want to interpret the question.

“I don’t think the sport will be here,” she said. “Young people don’t really do it anymore.”

Mr. Lachiondo had told me the same thing, but when Ms. Martija Gónzalez relayed the question to Mr. Perurena, his response was unequivocal.

“If the Basque people survive and the Basque culture survives, so will this sport,” he said, “especially if more people like you take an interest in it.”

IF YOU GO

Getting There

There are four airports within a 90-minute drive of Leitza: San Sebastián, Pamplona, Bilbao and Biarritz. Leitza is a 40-minute drive south of San Sebastián.

Where to Stay

San Sebastián is a great base for exploring the region. Pension Aia (Zabaleta 40; 34-9432-70011; pensionaia.com) is a stylish budget-oriented choice two blocks from Zurriola Beach and a 15-minute walk from the old town. (Light sleepers should ask for a room that doesn’t face the street.) No air-conditioning. Rooms with shared bath from 30 euros, about $40 at $1.25 to the euro; private bath from 70 euros.

In Pamplona, another convenient base for visiting Peru Harri and the region, the Gran Hotel La Perla (Plaza del Castillo 1; 34-948-223-000; granhotellaperla.com) is a recently restored historic hotel where Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin and Orson Wells once stayed. Rooms from 137 euros.

Where to Eat

San Sebastián is a foodie’s dream with scores of great choices, but head to Zabaleta Street in the Gros District any Thursday night for the best deal in town. Dozens of pintxo bars in the neighborhood offer pintxos, wine and beer for just 2 euros each. Look for the crowds spilling out onto the streets.

In San Sebastián’s old town, try the famous brochetas de gambas at Bar Goiz Argi (Calle Fermin Calbeton 4; 34-9434-25204).

Venture 20 minutes south of Leitza to Sidrería Larraun Sagardotegia (Calle San Fermin 1, Iribas, 34-948-50-7203; larraunsagardotegia.com) for a memorable meal at an authentic, rural cider house from around 1800.

What to Do

Peru Harri is on a farm outside Leitza and is open by appointment only (34-6597-01045, Spanish or Basque only, peruharri@hotmail.com.) The Kontxako Bandera regatta takes place in San Sebastián the first two Sundays in September. Basque rural sports competitions and demonstrations take place in nearly every Basque town and city during patron saint festivals.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section TR, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Visiting a Real Rock Star. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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