Little could the Bilbao shipowner Santiago Arana have imagined that from within his family there would emerge a figure who was going to change the history of the Basque people forever. A convinced Carlist, his ideas were going to cost him and his near ones years of exile in Iparralde.

Sabino Arana, in those years of childhood and early youth, would follow the ideology of his parents until his brother Luis, one morning in 1882, convinced him to abandon the Carlist cause and thoroughly study the history of the Basque people.