The brothers Ybarra y de la Revilla – Fernando, Gabriel and Emilio – founded
El Pueblo Vasco ("The Basque People") on 1 May 1910, with Juan de la Cruz as founding editor. The paper supported Vizcaya's young
Conservative Party and its
editorial line was
clerical,
Alfonsist monarchist,
free press and
Basque regional autonomist. The paper's chief competitor in Bilbao was
La Gaceta del Norte. Due to these conservative stances,
El Pueblo Vasco was shut down by the
Spanish Republic government on 17 July 1936, just before the
Spanish Civil War. It was almost a year later, on 6 July 1937, when the paper published again, after the fall of Bilbao; it was joined on newsstands by
El Correo Español, the official newspaper of the
Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS, the Spanish
fascist party, using the seized presses of the Basque nationalist daily
Euzkadi. By order of
caudillo Francisco Franco's government on 13 April 1938, the two papers combined as
El Correo Español-El Pueblo Vasco, owned by El Pueblo Vasco S.A. but controlled by the Falange. During the first 15 years of
Francoist Spain,
El Correo acquired its competitors
El Noticiero Bilbaíno (1939) and
El Diario Vasco (1945). Upon this last purchase, the company's name was changed to Bilbao Editorial S.A. The year 1965 saw
El Correo move to its current offices in Calle Pintor Losada, convert to
tabloid format and increase the number of pages. In 1976,
El Correo for the first time surpassed
La Gaceta del Norte in sales, becoming the best-selling newspaper in northern Spain. Also around this time, publisher
Javier de Ybarra y Bergé was kidnapped and murdered by rogue elements of the Basque separatist organization
ETA.
Vatican had a share in
El Correo until 1989.
El Correo was the promoter of
La Vuelta, the yearly bicycle race around Spain, between 1955 and 1978. However, due to
ETA organising attacks on the race from the late 1960s, and increasing disorder around the race in the late 1970s during the
Spanish transition to democracy, the
Royal Spanish Cycling Federation banned the race from passing through the Basque Country, resulting in
El Correo's announcement in January 1979 that it would no longer organise the race. It was subsequently promoted by the sports event company Unipublic and did not return to the Basque Country until
2011. ==Expansion==