Spain

Eibar’s wood and water resources around the Ego River supported its industrial growth.¹ The ironworks charter of 1335 protected workers’ earnings and their access to timber for charcoal, ore, water and roads, and exempted them from specified tolls and taxes.² It also protected trade in supplies arriving by the Deva waterway.² The Ego ironworks drew their ore principally from Somorrostro, through ports including Deba, Mutriku and Bermeo.³

The forges made pikes, lances and darts before they turned to light firearms.⁴ Testimony in a lawsuit of 1533 placed the start of pike production in 1490, when residents began planting ash trees for shafts.⁴ In 1520 traders carried arms towards Castilian towns, and testimony records sales of firearms at Castrojeriz.⁵ The Crown established royal factories in Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya to supply its armies.⁶

These royal factories coordinated and inspected orders rather than concentrating manufacture in one building.⁷ At Placencia de las Armas–Soraluze, contractors negotiated with guilds of barrel makers, lock makers, stock makers and makers of fittings.⁷ The guilds distributed the work among workshops in Eibar, Elgoibar, Ermua, Elgeta and Zaldibar.⁷ The French occupation of Guipúzcoa and the sack of Eibar in the war of 1793–1794 showed how vulnerable the district was, and the Crown responded by establishing another factory at Oviedo.⁸

As Placencia declined, Oviedo received more of the royal orders.⁸ Industrial liberalisation began in 1860, and the Placencia factory closed in 1865.⁸ The collapse of the guild system helped private arms firms expand.⁸ After the Carlist war of 1872–1876 the state preferred arms from Oviedo or from foreign suppliers, and the Basque firms specialised in civilian weapons, with Eibar as their principal urban centre.⁸ Hunting guns, revolvers and pistols replaced the military arms that lacked civilian buyers.⁹

Eibar gained a telegraph station in 1883 and a railway branch in 1887, which strengthened its links with national and international markets.¹⁰ Electricity freed manufacturers from the production limits of water and steam power.¹¹ Exports of revolvers and pistols drove the district’s strongest growth, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹² Because the domestic market was small, makers looked overseas, and exports approached 90 per cent of the historical industry’s total.¹¹

The First World War at first stopped production, as Spain prohibited arms exports and banks refused credit in the summer of 1914.¹³ Allied orders then raised output in 1915, with Eibar supplying revolvers and simple semi-automatic pistols known as Eibar-type or Ruby pistols.¹⁴ In September 1920 the government restricted arms sales to licence holders.¹⁵ Local representatives sought exemptions for hunting guns as sporting equipment, but their proposals failed.^{15, 16} Without the state support they had requested, manufacturers turned towards sewing machines, bicycles and other products.¹⁶

On 25 April 1937 bombing and fire destroyed industrial premises in Eibar.¹⁷ The Aurrera foundry, which supplied malleable iron to gunmakers, built replacement premises in 1940.^{18, 17} Postwar shotgun makers competed for American sales while Spain faced shortages of steel and other essential materials.¹⁹ The King brothers later helped AYA develop guns for British tastes, using a Holland & Holland sidelock and a Westley Richards boxlock as patterns for its No. 1, No. 2, No. 4 and No. 4 de Luxe.²⁰

Industrial growth crowded Eibar, and factories that could no longer expand had to leave.²¹ The economic crisis that began in the late 1970s deepened in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s.²² After DIARM’s consolidation collapsed in 1988, Imanol Aranzabal bought AYA’s remaining parts and set up a smaller workshop; by 1989 the new firm was again making fine double guns.^{23, 20, 24} After successive crises and restructuring, firms adopted new production technology.²⁵ Asociación Armera organises international exhibitions and trade missions to open markets.²⁶