One of the anecdotes told by this native of Bilbao and Navarre by adoption, had to do with his time as a student of History and Law, when he was evicted from the University's Office of the Executive Council during the upheavals of 1968. He was not a revolutionary, nor was he someone who accepted commonplaces, and he applied this critical zeal to his work constantly, demanding of himself an excellence that he always sought, in the substantial and in the accessory (such as his punctilious zeal against typos).

He thus managed to become the youngest Full Professor in Contemporary History, the first to occupy that place in the newly created University of the Basque Country, in 1982. As a way to do so, he had written a doctoral thesis (1976), very typical of his time, on labor relations in Biscay from 1890 to 1936, but from a perspective that differed from the usual orientation and in opposition to it, which earned him a shower of criticism. It was a first sample of a self-demand that always led him to explore ways in which he could expose a critical perspective with the dominant. His first years as a teacher had an impact on this line, encouraging his students in Murcia, the Basque Country and Navarre, to go deeper, to read critically, to base and debate, as he himself did, organizing seminars, coffees and any meeting in which to talk and discuss.

His classes were, thus, a school of concerns, trying to achieve in students a nonconformism that would delve into the problems, and whenever the circumstances arose, to continue with thesis or publications. That is why he himself began to wonder about History itself, its character and object, opening since the eighties the reflection and analysis of the discipline, a line of research that he would not leave, from the seed planted by his teacher Valentín Vázquez de Prada and through his partnership in the International Conversations of History, from 1984 to 2010. From then on, he made contact with the main representatives of the subject, with whom his critical zeal, his capacity for conviction and the demand to broaden horizons and perfect the knowledge, was put at the service of the discussion.

This perspective did not prevent him from paying attention to immediate issues, promoting research on Basque-Navarre contemporaneity, always a topic of his own analysis and study and of many of the researches he directed (up to 19 memories of licentiate degree and 20 doctoral thesis ), as well as topic of many seminars in some years in which the issue needed analysis and calmness. His religious convictions played a central role in this, which counterbalanced a fragile health that kept him retired from time to time, depriving those of us who had him as a teacher of his guide in the best sense, reflected in the humility of giving us his own texts in case we could make suggestions. Always attentive to those who worked with him, willing to correct or comment on a work, a project, accessible to those who requested his financial aid even above his tasks.

His family, starting with María Jesús Santos, his children and grandchildren, of whom he boasted so much, are aware of the exceptional nature of his figure and the extraordinary memory he leaves among those of us who knew him. May he rest in peace.