culminated in the first two Congresses of 1987 and 1989, approving the basic principles of what is currently the Mondragon Corporation. Thought and practical principles Precedents Arizmendiarrieta, in his quest for social justice and human dignity, was not a visionary who created business models by intuition. He had extensive historical, business and ideological knowledge based on many years of observation and reading. His uniqueness was that, with a lot of pragmatism, he knew how to help implement his theoretical ideas in concrete creations. Historical Arizmendiarrieta knew well the cooperative precedents of the Basque Country. In fact, the spirit of cooperation has long been deeply rooted among farmers, popularly known as “Auzolan” (Community work). It is the performance of free work by neighbours that benefits everyone; through a neighborhood assembly, the place, method and people (one member for each farm) who are going to carry it out are decided, mainly the opening and/or maintenance of public roads, churches, hermitages or public buildings, or as a when a neighbor needs it. On the other hand, in the 20th century the first consumer cooperative, promoted by the nationalist union ELA/STV, was created in Bilbao in 1919, followed by others in Vizcaya. These cooperatives were also open to non-members. And they operated according to the cooperative principles of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844 in England, and currently maintained by the ICA - International Co-operative Alliance. In the Vitoria Congress in 1933, the union agreed to strengthen the cooperative movement, and the first production and credit cooperatives were also created. Also, in 1920 the socialist union UGT helped several affiliates, workers of companies in crisis, to achieve self-employment by creating the ALFA cooperative in Eibar. It began manufacturing weapons, and from 1925 also sewing machines. It was the largest industrial cooperative of the time, being its managing director Toribio Echevarria, admired and loved by Arizmendiarrieta for his professionalism and integrity. Business The Deba Valley and its seven towns, since the thirteenth century were linked to forges and metallurgy. Thus, in the 15th century, a large part of the 1,900 inhabitants of Mondragon dedicated themselves to obtaining steel billets, which on the one hand they sold and exported for the manufacture of weapons, and on the other they transformed by hand into nails and ironwork. The forges were complex installations that allowed the energy of the water to activate the machinery necessary