Abarka: the Basque Leather Sandal Behind the Espadrille

The abarka is the traditional leather sandal of the Pyrenees. English Wikipedia describes it as made from a single piece of calf leather, tied with braided wool laces wrapped around the socks. Before the espadrille spread across the Basque Country, it was the everyday shoe of farm work; today it lives on mostly in dance.

Names

Careful with two look-alikes: in Cantabria, albarca means a wooden shoe, and the Balearic avarca of Menorca is a separate sandal with its own history. English Wikipedia gives both their own articles.

Abarka vs espadrille

French Wikipedia says that in the Basque Country the espadrille "supplanted the abarka". English Wikipedia adds that rubber sandals took its place too, in agriculture.

The word that travelled

The abarka matters to espadrille history because of its name. Spanish Wikipedia and Wiktionary both say the Spanish alpargata came from Andalusian Arabic al-barḡāt, which probably came from Basque abarka. Spanish Wikipedia splits abarka into abar, "small branch", and a suffix -ka, so the word may first have meant something made of twigs. English Wikipedia calls alpargata a Mozarabic derivative of abarka. The comparison is laid out on alpargata vs espadrille.

So the Spanish name of the rope-soled shoe may come from a leather sandal, while the French, Catalan and Basque names of the same shoe come from a grass. Both stories are covered on where does the word espadrille come from.

Common mistakes

The first mistake is to treat abarka and espadrille as synonyms. They share a history, but the abarka is one piece of leather with laces wrapped over the socks, while the espadrille has a braided sole and a sewn-on upper. The second is to assume every Pyrenean shoe is an abarka: the Balearic avarca is a different sandal, and in Cantabria albarca names a wooden shoe. A third mistake is to trust one source for the origin of the word. Dictionaries and encyclopedias write probably for good reason, since the Basque origin is given as a probability, not a certainty. When a text names alpargata and abarka side by side, check whether it talks about the word or about the object.

Where you see abarkas now

English Wikipedia notes that abarkas remain in use for dance, and its photo of Olentzero, a figure of the Basque Christmas tradition, shows him wearing them. For the Basque word for the espadrille itself, see espartin.