Juan Venancio Araquistáin

Juan Venancio Araquistáin (Deva, 1828 - Tolosa, November 7, 1906) was a Spanish writer.

Born into a wealthy family from the Deva town of Gipuzkoa. Araquistáin studied laws at the University of Valladolid. He worked as a journalist for a long time and later as a registrar of property in Azpeitia and Tolosa. It settled down in this last locality where it passed away in 1906. Literary work

The work of Araquistáin can be inscribed within the romanticism of the nineteenth century. Araquistáin stood out as a collector of stories and traditional Basque legends. His best-known work is Vasco-Cántabras Traditions, a collection of eight short stories that he published in 1866 when he was 38 years old. This work was the starting point of a genre, that of traditional legends and tales, which was widely disseminated and successful in the Basque Country during the second half of the 19th century. It also had an influence on the birth of the Basque nationalism, although the work of Araquistáin lacked a political motivation. It seems that the author was based on traditions that he collected mainly in his native town, although it is not known to what extent the legends of Araquistáin pick up an ancestral tradition or they are literary creations of the own author.

The work of Araquistáin was mainly done in Castilian, although he also wrote some works in the Basque language. In 1886 he published in the magazine Euskalerria, Lelo Kantzoa (Canto de Lelo).

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