Nearby: Xabier Agote
Hello, I'm Xabier Agote. I’m a boat carpenter and I’m in charge of the Ondartxo Maritime Culture Centre in Pasaia.
My work focuses on the recovery of ships in the Basque Country. And what we do for that is to study what the ships of yesteryear were like, and we build the ship accordingly, with different purposes. On the one hand, to know what these old boats were like and, on the other hand, because they have heritage value and to communicate what the Basque Country was at sea.
The thing is that when I was a little girl I used to go to the port of San Sebastián, both to fish and to bathe. When I was little, there were many wooden boats that belong to us, which have maintained the characteristics of... But at the same time I witnessed the decline of these ships. And when I was 18, I found out that there were schools where I could study this type of profession, and that's when I decided to study it. I don't know why, it's always been a hobby, and the thing is, I've turned hobby into a profession.
I studied naval shipbuilding 20 years ago to become a naval carpenter. And I had this opportunity far away, in the United States, at the naval school of the maritime museum in the state of Maine. And along with the profession or profession, I had the chance, unexpectedly, to discover a new way of managing and preserving the maritime heritage.
My intention was to recover this living legacy known in the United States, which is recovered with the participation of society, also in the Basque Country, to do here the same as what was learned in the United States.
The work we do serves to discover what the maritime past of the Basque Country was like. It is well understood that we need to take care of the terrestrial architecture. And perhaps the architecture of the sea, this typology of the sea, created by our ancestors and developed over the centuries, has been forgotten. The sea has always been farther away from us, even the boats have been built of wood, so their survival has been short, we have very little clue. Therefore, in this lies the importance of our work, this past, in the recovery of this forgotten marine technology.
I would say that the work we do is highly valued in society. We tend to always work in front of people, both when we build ships and when we go to sea. We invite people, we give lectures, and on average we see that there is a growing interest in society.
The worst part of my profession I would say is that when you don’t get enough help, the work to achieve your goals is always uphill, and since it is based on passion, I devote most of my free time and holidays, etc., to my work.
It has a lot of good parts. On the one hand, it has allowed me to meet very interesting people, high-level researchers, archaeologists... through whom I have had the opportunity to learn a lot. And on the other hand, when you build for the first time a ship that disappeared a long time ago, using the technology of the time, for me this is very rich. On the other hand, we tend to use the boats that we build later in the sea. And so in the construction process we have the opportunity to dream about the sea, and we think in advance about the characteristics of the boat in the sea, how it will work... the sea allows you to solve these unknowns later, which is very satisfying.
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