On 13 October, at 18:00 a.m., the Aldabe Civic Center will host the programme that Errekaleor members have prepared to celebrate the seventh anniversary of the neighbourhood. They will start at the base: During the talk, the guest will talk about what Errekaleor is, how it is organized and many other questions about it.

Errekaleor is seven years old and has prepared a series of activities, including those that symbolically "occupy" some corners of Vitoria-Gasteiz.

On 14 October, Casa Aldabe Gizrate will also hold a number of presentations on the occupation. During the interview, in addition to commenting on the experiences of the housing movement brought from the Catalan countries, the criminalization of the occupation that has been multiplying in the media in recent months will be discussed.

On 16 October, "okuparán" Taberna Hala Bedi, with a round table on rural occupation, to be held at 17:00.

Bertsos, music, talks and more

The neighborhood will be the one that has the most prominence in the anniversary programming. On 15 October the bertsosaioa will be held at 19:30 hours and for this they have invited bertsolaris of different sizes: Manex Agirre, Miren Artetxe, Andoni Egaña and Nerea Ibarzabal.

On Saturday, October 17, they will depart from Errekaleor and perform a bicycle tour through the different occupied spaces of the city. Then, at 18:00 in the afternoon, at the round table in Errekaleor, the trajectories of the different movements will be analysed. On Saturday night there will be an offer of concerts and dinners at Plaza Nueva de Bilbao.

On Sunday, 18 October, the closing ceremony of the Centennial of the European Cultural Capitality will take place. In the morning, activities for all ages will cover the district: Tell stories, big heads, paint faces or puppet musicated by the station.

Errekaleor, a better world?

Errekaleor is a neighborhood built for workers who doubled the population of Vitoria-Gasteiz in the 1950s as a result of the industrialization process. At first he was named A Better World, but finally he became Errekaleor by the dry river that passes through the neighborhood. Built on the periphery of Vitoria-Gasteiz, the neighborhood lived for decades, with a strong community identity.

In the context of the urbanization process that lived in the south of the city at the beginning of the 21st century, the institutions ordered the transfer of the neighbors in order to empty, demolish and rebuild the neighborhood. Most of the neighbors -not all of them - had to leave the neighborhood, but as the years passed, Errekaleor's reconstruction project was paralyzed by the abandonment of both urban and local institutions such as Ensanche 21. The explosion of the housing bubble aggravated the situation, while in Vitoria-Gasteiz the number of empty homes (over 10,000) and the price of sales and rentals continued to rise.

In this context, in 2013, a small group of students studying at the Vitoria-Gasteiz campus of the UPV/EHU began to meet in an assembly to deal with the expensive rentals they had to pay. It was then that the idea emerged, the starting point: the recovery of an empty house in the neighborhood of Errekaleor, in a state of abandonment for years, concretely block 26.

The Errekaleor River, known since then, has become a sea. With the simple objective of housing, after the 10 young people who silently recovered that first block, hundreds of people from very different backgrounds have passed through the neighborhood, recovering more housing and starting dozens of different projects.