Boatmen from Pasaia

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, women of passages show great skill in steering boats and sloops. These, along with sailors, fencers, muskets were of great strength and as brave in war, every woman was a heroine who surprised because when sailors sailed with his galleons pasaitarras to Newfoundland for cod fishing or hunting Whale, the people stayed, often without men. So were the women who replaced them perfectly. Atoaje themselves towed to the galleys, galleons and galleons.
The Spanish king Philip IV in 1659 among others visited the Port of flights. The show that the king was able to witness in the bay must have been the most outstanding for the period. Concentrated in the channel several warships, the galleon Roncesvalles and Real Captain of 1,500 tons and 90 guns. More than two hundred boats followed the barge where the king went, each ruled by local women, whose skill with the oar impressed the monarch. So much so that a couple of years later, twelve bateleras were requested by the Duke of Medina de las Torres Flights to amuse the queen with his show in the pond Buen Retiro.
The popularity of the event reached the Town and Court must have had a wide resonance. And so, almost two centuries later, in January 1842, the dramatist Manuel Breton de los Herreros premiered, first in Madrid and then in Spain, his popular work The Bateleras Fine Fare.
As described by Breton de los Herreros, the Bateleras wore straw hat, surrounded the cup with broad black ribbon, red or blue, the ends, decorated with anchors, fell on his shoulders. In the bond formed with ribbon rosette by way of ornament symbolic of bateleras. The neck, very low cut, but covered with silk scarf tie with seafood. The usual color of the jacket was purple welt cuffs and angled cuffs with tapes. The outer skirt, chocolate brown, the collection had to facilitate their work. Almost always went barefoot.
The progressive modernization of vessels made extinguishing the old office of batelera. It is said that the last batelera of flights was Braulia Goyenetxea, of San Juan, which he held until the second decade of this century.
Today, in the race of bateleras held annually during the holidays, becomes a happy nostalgic evocation causing renewed.
.