By the 1920s, a Basque newspaper had already written up the supposed “last alboka player,” treating the instrument as a curiosity on its way out. It wasn’t extinct yet, but by the middle of the twentieth century the entire unbroken line of traditional players had narrowed to essentially two men: Leon Bilbao, born in 1916 in the farmhouse village of Artea, and Silbestre Elezkano, known as “Txilibrin,” born four years earlier in nearby Igorre. Both men learned the instrument as boys from a relative, both made their own instruments from cow horn and cane, and both kept performing in public long after the accordion had pushed the alboka Basque instrument out of the region’s dance halls. Without them, and without the deliberate rebuilding effort that followed their generation, there is a real chance the alboka would not exist today outside a museum case.
That distinction matters because most descriptions of the alboka stop at “traditional Basque wind instrument” and move on, which flattens a genuinely unusual survival story into wallpaper. An instrument that nearly disappeared and then didn’t survived because specific, named people refused to let it, not because “tradition” is self-sustaining. Understanding who those people were, and what a later generation of researchers and makers deliberately did to rebuild the instrument’s audience, explains why the alboka sounds and is taught the way it is today, and why it is worth hearing if you ever come across it at a Basque festival or folk concert.
This account draws on the institutional history of the instrument published by Eusko Ikaskuntza, the Society of Basque Studies, written by Manu Gojenola Onaindia, author of the book-length study Albokaren Alde Batzuk (Some Aspects of the Alboka); on Basque-language press coverage, including obituary reporting from the daily Berria; and on a 2025 interview reported independently by two separate Basque-language outlets. Every specific date, name, and figure below is drawn from at least two independent sources.
What the Alboka Actually Is
The alboka looks strange before it sounds strange. Two thin cane pipes, each drilled with finger holes, are bound side by side to a wooden handle. At the far end of each pipe sits a bell made of animal horn, and at the near end, where the player’s mouth goes, a second, smaller horn caps a single reed cut directly into a sliver of cane. Structurally, this makes the alboka a single reed instrument in the same family as a clarinet, not a double reed instrument like an oboe or a Basque dulzaina. Because it has two of everything working in tandem, though, Basque organological writing has long described it as a kind of double clarinet, and that is the more useful way to picture it: two simple wind instruments, played as one.
The horn cap around the reed does something a plain reed can’t: it lets the player store and redirect breath so the reed never stops vibrating, a technique called circular breathing. The player inhales through the nose while continuing to force stored air out through the mouth, keeping a constant column of air moving through the pipes. Traditional players learned the skill with a straw and a glass of water, blowing an unbroken stream of bubbles until the technique became automatic. There is no bag, as with a bagpipe, to store air in reserve. The player’s cheeks and throat do that work directly.
The alboka is not alone in its broader family. In Spanish, this entire family of single reed, horn-belled hornpipes is known collectively as the albogue, and organologists trace it back to reed instruments depicted on Old Kingdom Egyptian tomb reliefs. Several single-piped members of the albogue family survive elsewhere in Spain: the gaita gastoreña around Cádiz, the now nearly extinct gaita serrana that Madrid’s shepherds once played, and the chifla de Campoo in Cantabria. None of these relatives share the alboka’s defining feature: two pipes, two horns, one breath, played at once. That double construction, not just the horn bell or the reed, is what makes the specifically Basque alboka genuinely rare rather than merely regional.
Documented in Basque Villages Since 1443
The earliest specific written record of the alboka being played in Basque territory dates to 1443 in Mondragón, in the Debagoiena area of Gipuzkoa, where a document notes that tamboril, alboka, and pandero were used for dances and songs. Later references confirm continuous use: a 1777 note from the Duranguesado region about not wanting to interrupt the summer evening tamboril-and-alboka sessions, and 1826 Christmas verses from Bizkaia that mention “albokia” by name.
The instrument’s traditional range extended across three areas: the Arratia valley at the foot of the Gorbea range in Bizkaia (the villages of Artea, Lemoa, and Zeanuri appear repeatedly in the record), the Goierri district of Gipuzkoa around Aizkorri, and, in Navarra, the Urbasa massif, with earlier historical presence also recorded around Aralar, the mountain range straddling the Gipuzkoa-Navarra border. Traditional albokaris were almost always baserritarrak, people who lived and worked on rural farmsteads, or shepherds who played while watching over sheep, goats, or cattle. Most learned the instrument around age twelve or thirteen from a family member or a neighbor who already played, built their own instruments from horn, cane, wood, and wax, and had no formal music training at all. Performances centered on a narrow repertoire of three traditional forms, the jota, the porrusalda, and the marcha, usually with a pandero player keeping rhythm and singing coplas alongside the alboka’s melody.
Navarra’s connection to the instrument runs deeper than geography alone. The Capuchin friar and musicologist José Gonzalo Zulaica y Arregui, known as Padre Donostia, lived at the Colegio de Lekaroz in Navarra’s Baztán valley and died there in 1956. His fieldwork and writing on Basque folk instruments, archived in Lekaroz to this day, underpins much of the documentary record cited above and by later alboka researchers.
The Two Men Who Wouldn’t Let It Die
The alboka’s decline began in the late nineteenth century, when the diatonic accordion arrived and, with its wider musical range, began pulling audiences away from the alboka, the dulzaina, and the pandero at village romerías. The twentieth century compounded the problem as rural workers left farm and shepherding life for industrial and service jobs, taking the instrument’s usual apprenticeship path with them. By the 1920s, as noted above, at least one newspaper article was already describing a supposed “last alboka player.”
Two men kept that claim from becoming literally true. Silbestre Elezkano, called “Txilibrin,” was born on August 15, 1912, in Igorre and learned the alboka from his uncle, Ignacio Uribarri, starting around age ten. He was performing at romerías by fifteen. Beyond the instrument itself, Txilibrin was a dancer, a tambourine player, a verse singer, and an alboka maker; in the 1940s he helped found the folk groups Dindirri and Beti Alai, through which he carried alboka music not just around the Basque Country but to Catalonia, France, Italy, Latin America, the United States, and Canada. He recorded six records, appeared in two films, and gave his final public performance in June 1998 at the Teatro Arriaga in Bilbao, before retiring. He died in Bilbao on July 30, 2003.
Leon Bilbao Ibarretxe was born on December 19, 1916, in Artea, and learned the alboka from his father, Jose Mari Bilbao, at age twelve. He built his own instruments, had a reputation for being able to imitate any other albokari’s individual style, and recorded on six records himself, often performing alongside pandero player Maurizia Aldeiturriaga. He died on November 18, 1990. His most significant legacy may be his students: he taught many, but the most prominent by far was Ibon Koteron, who today is considered the leading alboka player of his generation.
Eusko Ikaskuntza’s own published history of the instrument states the case plainly: Txilibrin and Leon Bilbao are the two who “can be considered the classic albokaris, the ones who will remain for posterity,” specifically because of their skill, the number of times they performed in public, the number of instruments they sold, and the recordings they left behind. Between the two of them, an instrument that a newspaper had already pronounced nearly dead stayed audible, playable, and teachable long enough for a deliberate revival to take hold.
The Deliberate Rebuild
That revival did not happen by accident. Three figures, working across different decades, are the specific reason the alboka has an active player base today rather than a dwindling handful of holdouts.
Mariano Barrenetxea, born in Galdakao in 1938, is a player, teacher, and instrument maker, but his more consequential role was as a researcher. His written work, including the influential 1976 study Alboka, entorno folklórico, and his organizing of the first formal gatherings of albokaris in 1967 and 1968, is directly credited with pulling the instrument’s documentation and public visibility back from the edge of oblivion.
Juan Mari Beltran, born in Etxarri Aranatz in 1947, is an organologist and multi-instrumentalist who solved a practical problem that had limited the alboka for generations: traditional instruments were not built to a standard pitch, which is part of why they were rarely played together or alongside other instruments. Beltran tempered the alboka to A = 440 Hz, the standard concert pitch, introduced sturdier materials such as boxwood in place of cane pipes, and developed an extended-range model known as the alboka sol-sol, giving players more melodic room than the traditional instrument allowed.
Ibon Koteron, born in Bilbao in 1967 and Leon Bilbao’s most prominent student, is now the instrument’s leading contemporary voice. He has composed new original pieces for the alboka, expanded its repertoire well beyond the traditional jota, porrusalda, and marcha into ballads and songs that were not historically played on the instrument at all, and founded teaching schools that have trained a large share of today’s active players.
The results of that combined effort are measurable. According to a 2025 interview reported independently by both the national Basque-language daily Berria and its regional edition Bizkaiko Hitza, there are approximately 140 active alboka players across the Basque Country today. Unlike the old baserritarra players who learned by ear from a relative, most of today’s albokaris have formal music training and play more than one instrument. The alboka has not simply survived. It has been rebuilt into something closer to a living instrument again than a museum piece.
What to Know Before You Go Looking for One
The alboka is not part of the San Fermín festival program and has no documented role in the encierro itself; its home is the broader landscape of Basque folk music, heard today at folk concerts, dance performances, and street processions across Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, and Navarra rather than as fiesta-week entertainment specifically. The closest most visitors get to live Basque folk instrumentation during San Fermines is the txistu and gaita processions run by Pamplona’s own peñas, which is a related tradition but not the alboka itself. To actually hear an alboka, look for Basque folk music festivals and traditional dance performances outside fiesta week, since that is where the instrument’s living tradition is kept.
For the wider vocabulary of Basque and Navarran terms that come up across this site, the Running of the Bulls Vocabulary dictionary covers festival and encierro-specific terminology in more depth than a single instrument profile can.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an alboka?
The alboka is a traditional Basque wind instrument made of two cane melody pipes bound to a wooden handle, each fitted with an animal horn bell, with a single reed housed in a horn mouthpiece cap that allows the player to use circular breathing for continuous sound. It is classified as a single reed instrument, in the same family as a clarinet, but its double-pipe construction lets one player sound two notes or lines at once.
Is the alboka a type of bagpipe?
No. The alboka produces continuous sound through circular breathing rather than an air-storing bag, which is the defining feature of true bagpipes. The technique achieves a similar unbroken sound, but the mechanism, and the skill required, is different.
How many people still play the alboka today?
Roughly 140 people actively play the alboka across the Basque Country as of a 2025 estimate, most of them formally trained musicians rather than the self-taught shepherd players of the instrument’s traditional past.
Is the alboka a Bizkaia instrument or a Navarra instrument?
Both, though most documented history centers on Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa. The instrument was also traditionally played in Navarra, particularly around the Urbasa massif, and Navarra’s Baztán valley, specifically Lekaroz, is where the friar-musicologist Padre Donostia carried out foundational fieldwork on Basque folk instruments, including the alboka.
Every article on the Encierro blog is authored or reviewed by active bull runners with direct experience in Pamplona.