Season 22 • Episode 12
LatestGoenkale is a Basque soap-opera, produced by Pausoka Entertainment and ETB, which is broadcast every Monday and Tuesday on Basque Radio-television's first channel, ETB 1. Set up in an imaginary Basque seaside town, the title of the serial is the name of the main street in that town. First broadcast in 1994, almost 3,000 episodes have been made so far, and it is one of the most successful programmes of ETB 1. In the beginning every chapter lasted 30 minutes and they were broadcast from Monday to Friday. Then the Friday episode was removed. Since 2004 two one hour long episodes are broadcast every Monday and Tuesday. Then thirty-minute episodes are repeated in the afternoon everyday.
Production
Same fictional town for 30 years—imagine the property disputes.
Writing
Keeping 3,000 episodes coherent deserves a Nobel Prize in stamina.
Creator
Anjel Lertxundi
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Goenkale became accidental archive: during Franco's suppression of Basque culture, this soap opera became one of the few mass-media spaces where Euskara survived and thrived.
The 'imaginary' seaside town is suspiciously specific—locals swear they recognize their own harbors, causing decades of friendly inter-town rivalry over who owns the fictional geography.
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