> Virtual visit of the Blessed Gárate Farm-House

The Errekarte Farm-House. 

The door leads directly to a deep vestibule you can see in your Virtual visit. On the right there is the kitchen and another room that has been converted into a chapel, presided by a picture of the Brother by a sculptor from Bilbao, Basterra, who knew him personally.

On the left, the mangers for the cattle. Behind, the stable and next a room with an assorted collection of traditional farming implements. Because Blessed Garate’s native farm-house, in addition to being a religious monument, is also an ethnographical museum, a model of the old farm-houses of Guipúzcoa. From this room you may pass on to the cellar, close to the door of the house, where the family used to give lodging and food to beggars. This is where Brother must have learned the art of welcoming the needy that would distinguish him as infirmarian and doorkeeper.

A narrow and steep staircase by the side of the kitchen leads to the upper floor and we find a dining room and next a corridor with the bedrooms, mere alcoves in fact with no windows. The second one is where Francisco was born.

From this corridor we go on to a large lumber room. The carts could enter in it directly with their loads of grass and unload them through a hole in the floor to the stable below. This lumber room, in its stark original simplicity, is now used as the main chapel of Errekarte, with just the addition of an altar and some pews.

From the lumber room one can climb to an open sun gallery where the produce of the land was left to dry. Its only new exhibit is a collection of “argizaiolas”, tables holding winding candles used of old in the churches in memory of the dead. Yet another narrow staircase allows us to go down directly to the vestibule where we had started our visit.

Apart from the scanty additions we have mentioned, there has been no reconstruction as such; the house remains as it was when Blessed Francisco Garate was born on 3 February 1857 and left for France to join the Society, one day before his 17th birthday, on 2 February 1874.