What Pierre Oteiza is known for
Founded in 1987 by farmer-charcutier Pierre Oteiza, who discovered the Basque black pie pig at the 1989 Paris Agriculture Show and helped rebuild it into today's Kintoa AOP breed. His Aldudes valley maison cures Kintoa pork into hams, saucissons and cochonnailles at a collective drying house it co-founded in 2000.
Pierre Oteiza was born to farming parents in Les Aldudes, a Basque village of roughly 350 people in the Pyrenees between Bayonne and Pamplona. At fifteen he apprenticed under his uncle Louis in Paris, working five years toward his butcher's certificate before returning home.
The turning point came in 1989, when Oteiza saw the last specimens of the Basque black pie pig at the Paris Agriculture Show. The breed had collapsed from roughly 140,000 animals in 1929 to just 20 by 1981, when it was designated endangered. Oteiza joined a wider circle of Basque breeders working to rebuild it: numbers grew from 25 animals in 1989 to around 7,000 by 2017. The regional chain association formed in 2001 pursued protected-designation status, and in 2010 the breed's hams and fresh meats were granted the name Kintoa under AOP rules.
Oteiza's own business, founded in 1987, started as a three-employee ham and cured-meat workshop before adding a cannery and, from 1993, boutiques in Capbreton, Ainhoa, Saint-Jean-de-Luz, Bordeaux and Paris. In 2000 he co-founded the Vallée des Aldudes Collective Drying House with four other Basque artisan charcuterie makers. Today the maison works with roughly 400 AOP Kintoa pigs a year, curing hams, saucissons, chorizos and cochonnailles, and runs guided tours and tastings from its Aldudes valley base.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Kintoa AOP Basque pork — hams, saucissons and cochonnailles from a revived breed.
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