In the modern European Union lies an ancient culture and language foreign to the dominant cultures surrounding it. These are the Basques who have fought to maintain their customs through invasions and cultural repression. The territory they call home is a small but powerful force within Spain. Spanish ideologies exerted on them in recent memory put a damper on cultural practices and the Basque language, but from this came Basque nationalism. The means used by Basque nationalists to gain independence are sometimes questionable and violent and have had an impact on the economic health of the region. The Basque Country gained autonomy under the Spanish Constitution of 1978, but many believe that autonomy is not enough. Spain, a country of nearly fifty million people on the Iberian Peninsula, is home to the vast majority of Basques in Europe. The Basque Country in Spain (Euskadi in Basque language) includes the northern Spanish provinces of Álava, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa (see Fig. 1). The province of Navarre directly east of Euskadi is sometimes included in the term "Basque Country" due to its large population of Basques. However, Navarre is a separate autonomous region within Spain and will be excluded from the term "Euskadi" for the purposes of this report. Euskadi is a mountainous region located between the eastern Cantabrian Mountains and the western slopes of the Pyrenees and borders France to the north-east, the Bay of Biscay to the north and the rest of Spain to the west, east and south. In the 2010 census, there were 2,178,339 people living in Euskadi, most of whom were of Basque origin. The largest cities are Bilbao (353,187 inhabitants), Vitoria-Gasteiz (2 inhabitants...... in the center of the map......agirrel, Concepción de la Rúa, Oscar García. “The place of the Basques in the European panorama of Y chromosome diversity”. .htmlBen-Ami, S. (1991). /stable/260657Instituto..)..