The Emmaus international work camps, organised since 1963 in France by the Union of Emmaus Friends and Companions (UACE), crossed over the Pyrenees, for a camp at Easter in 1970. A group of young Spaniards then began organising such camps every summer. In 1976, they managed to finally obtain a house in which two of them, Montxo Iturriza and his wife Araceli, set up the first rag-picking community in Sodupe near Bilbao. In Pamplona, Emmaus’s action that began in 1972 with a summer camp led to the creation of the second rag-pickers community in 1978.
