The first car in Gipuzkoa that circulated with a provincial license plate was a Renault D owned by the Marquis of Rafal. He did it, in the heat of the then recently approved carriage regulations, with the distinctive 1-SS. Miguel Martín Zurimendi knows this because he got its owner, a collector from Donostia who had acquired it in France, to take it to an exhibition that was organized on Paseo de Miramón to mark the centenary. He has written books on automotive, he has dusted off car records to unravel their history and he continues every day to hunt for license plates both on the street and in the archives, where the paperwork with buyers and sellers, as well as with the more technical data, such as the type of engine or the displacement.
Martín Zurimendi is not alone. In Euskadi and its surroundings, there are up to two hundred people interested in the plates that can be seen both on the front and the back of each car. “There are fans for everything and it is attracting more and more attention,” he explains. The group that is dedicated to spotting old vehicles and hunting license plates is not uniform, but is made up of fans whose interest has varied origins. “We are different fans, with different concerns. Some are friends of paper, others of photography, others come from the world of collecting,” he explains. In his case, his love for cars and license plates, for those numbers and letters that are used to identify and distinguish them, goes back to his childhood. “As long as I can remember, I have always looked at cars. We played license plate numbers, to see who could see the highest one. With provincial license plates, you identified people on the road and, when you made long summer trips, you greeted those you saw who were from your area,” he recalls.
If the first car registered in Gipuzkoa was a Renault D, in Bizkaia it was a Delahaye and in Álava a Fiat. Initially, the system suffered from a lack of uniformity, both in colors and in the arrangement of the provincial code and numbers. That 1-SS, for example, followed an inverse order to that which would be standardized later, with the code before and the numbers after. Over time, there were modifications to the codes. In a first stage, the provinces of Albacete (ALB), Cáceres (CAC), Castellón (CAS), Segovia (SEG) and Teruel (TER) changed their original three-letter code for another two; When the Canary Islands were divided into two provinces, it adopted the GC and the TF, and Navarra changed the PA for the NA. Later, with the return of democracy, Girona went from GE to GI, the Balearic Islands from PM to IB and Ourense from OR to OU. La Rioja approved changing the LO to the LR and in fact was going to do so in September 2000, when the provincial acronyms were definitively abandoned, so it was never used, because until the last one, until LO-1001-V, He arrived with his first ID.
All this is told by Martín Zurimendi, who also remembers that there were license plates for the African colonies, such as the SH of the Sahara. “All these license plates from the colonies were forced to switch to the national system,” he explains, and they ended up re-registered with the M for Madrid. There were also vehicles with their own FET and JONS license plates. In his research, he came across a “local surprise” in Euskadi, specifically in Durango. José Estancona Acha, an industrialist from the Biscayan town, manufactured a car on his own in 1948, from the engine to the bodywork. Despite not having an official license plate, he drove it with his family, with a license plate that simply said “Durango.” Estancona even presented three vehicles to the dictator Francisco Franco, but, although they attracted the attention of the regime, the project ended up falling on deaf ears and the idea of devoting itself to mass production of its models did not go beyond paper. The car with the Durango license plate continued to be driven, although it now had the province’s BI license plate.
Martín Zurimendi, who professionally works as a doctor, began tracking vehicles in Bilbao a long time ago. Over the years, it has expanded its focus to the whole of Euskadi and also to Navarra. But no more. “You have to focus, because if not it will never end,” he confesses. Nearly three decades ago, in 1996, he published a book titled ‘The automobile in Vizcaya: chronicle of a centenary’. At that time, the investigations involved many more difficulties. “Before, it was impossible to access any information through the DGT, unless you had the registration number,” he recalls. Now there are search engines connected to the DGT that help to find out whether the license plate is still valid, whether the car is still running somewhere. Even so, imbalances, disagreements, and traps persist. “Everything has to be taken with tweezers. “It can be stated up to a point,” he points out.
“Retired hours”
Now, little by little, the documentation is coming to light and the provincial institutions are already receiving the corresponding files from the DGT. In the case of Álava, the provincial archive has boxes with one card per vehicle, which indicates the license plate, model, chassis number, engine type and details of the first buyer. On the back, a list of the changes of hands to which the vehicle has been subject is detailed; There are those who did not see any streets other than those of Vitoria and others who had an eventful life, full of purchases and sales that took them to various corners of the Spanish geography. These files, which serve to make an initial composition of the life of the vehicle, are the key to broader documentation, which includes writings and supporting documents, as well as sometimes sanctions. Among these tokens are those of the nine luxury Alfa Romeos that the men of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini registered in Vitoria during the Civil War.
“You have to dedicate time to it and you need to have retired hours,” laments Martín Zurimendi, who is not, as he continues working as a doctor. Despite this, he steals hours from the clock to be able to move around the Basque geography and spend time immersing himself among ballots with the data of the Fiats, the De-Dion Boutons, the Lancias, the Chevrolets of the 20th century and their license plates, with their BI and their SS, their VI and their NA and the numbers that accompany them. And even then it is not easy. “We only have extracts that came from commercial relationships, from individuals. It’s all very fragmented. It is difficult to investigate and sometimes we go blindly,” he explains.
With license plates, the challenges can be as many as the imagination allows. Just as Martín Zurimendi played as a child to spot the highest number license plate, he could also have played to see the lowest number. Now, just as you are dedicated to tracking down the oldest vehicles in each province, you can also start looking for the last license plate that was issued in each place. And there it is too. In 1900, the provincial system was established, which consisted of the province code (one, two or three letters on the left at the beginning, only one or two later) and some numbers on the right. Thus it progressed slowly until 1971, when Madrid was already approaching one million and it was decided to include the letters at the end to allow many more combinations. Bizkaia, for example, started this new system with BI-0000-A. It ended once again when Madrid threatened to exhaust the combinations. The last of the Biscayan license plates was BI-9894-CV, which Martín Zurimendi and his companions have already identified as belonging to a motorcycle. They haven’t found her yet.
Later, at the turn of the millennium, a national system was adopted, in which the license plates of any car, whether from A Coruña, Girona or Cádiz, participated in the same series. It so happens that the car that inaugurated the new system, the current one with four numbers and three letters, was one from León that was re-registered in Vitoria. It became 0000-BBB. He is one of the usual extras in the procession that accompanies the Three Wise Men upon their arrival in Vitoria on the morning of January 5. More than twenty-four years later, the system is on the verge of welcoming the letter N, which inaugurates the second half of the 80 million possible combinations.
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