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Bilbao is the largest city of Biscay and of the Basque Country in northern Spain, home to about 347,000 people and over a million in its metropolitan area. It lies some 16 kilometres inland from the Bay of Biscay along the estuary of the Nervión, in a hollow of green hills that locals nickname the botxo, the hole.
Diego López V de Haro founded the town around 1300, and its port grew rich shipping wool and Biscayan iron across Europe. In the 19th and early 20th centuries heavy industry made it the heart of Spain's second most industrial region, until the Guggenheim Museum opened in 1997 and began a celebrated renewal that won the city the Lee Kuan Yew World City Prize in 2010.
Visitors today walk from Frank Gehry's museum along the river to the Seven Streets of the Casco Viejo, eat pintxos in its bars, cross Calatrava's Zubizuri bridge and ride the funicular up Artxanda, while Athletic Club fans fill San Mamés stadium.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is a museum of modern and contemporary art designed by Frank Gehry and opened by King Juan Carlos I on 18 October 1997. Its curving forms of stone, glass and titanium rise by the Nervión, and Richard Serra's steel sculptures The Matter of Time fill its longest gallery.
Puppy is a floral sculpture by Jeff Koons, first made in 1992, that stands on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. The 12.4-metre West Highland White Terrier is built of stainless steel and soil and planted with flowers such as marigolds, begonias, impatiens, petunias and lobelias.
Maman is a giant spider by Louise Bourgeois standing outside the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, one of several bronze castings of a work first made for Tate Modern in 1999. Over 9 metres high, its body is of rubbed bronze and it carries a sac holding 32 marble eggs.
Zubizuri, Basque for white bridge, is a footbridge over the Nervión designed by Santiago Calatrava and opened in 1997, linking Campo Volantin with Uribitarte near the Guggenheim. Its curved deck of glass bricks hangs from a white tied arch, though the glass is notoriously slippery in the rain.
Santiago Cathedral, dedicated to Saint James, is one of Bilbao's oldest buildings, built in the 14th and 15th centuries as the main parish church and a stop on the northern Camino de Santiago. Its Gothic cloister and the Puerta del Ángel contrast with a Gothic Revival tower finished in 1887.
Plaza Nueva is Bilbao's neoclassical square, designed in 1821 and opened in 1851, ringed by arcades entered through arches called cuevas. Under the arcades are some of the city's oldest taverns, and a flea market of old books, coins, stamps and birds fills it on Sundays.
Mercado de la Ribera stands on the Nervión beside the Casco Viejo and the Church of San Antón, and with 10,000 square metres of floor it is counted the biggest covered market in Europe. In 1990 Guinness named it the most complete municipal food market, and over 60 traders sell fish, meat and fruit.
Teatro Arriaga is Bilbao's Neo-Baroque opera house on the Nervión, opened on 31 May 1890 and named after the composer Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, the Spanish Mozart. Burned in 1914 and rebuilt in 1919, it was flooded in 1983 and reopened in 1986, its facade modelled on the Paris Opera.
The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum, opened in 1914 inside Doña Casilda Iturrizar Park, is the second largest museum in the Basque Country. Its collection runs from the Middle Ages to today, with works by El Greco, Goya, Van Dyck and Gauguin beside Basque painters and modern artists such as Francis Bacon.
The Basilica of Begoña in Bilbao is the shrine of Our Lady of Begoña, patroness of Biscay. Begun in 1511 in late Gothic style, it gained its present tower between 1902 and 1907, and sailors returning up the river would start to pray when they first saw its steeple.
The Artxanda Funicular has climbed from the centre of Bilbao to the summit of Mount Artxanda since 1915, rising 226 metres in about three minutes. Its lower station lies just north of the Zubizuri bridge, and the hilltop park at the top gives panoramic views over the city and the river.
Pintxos are the small bar snacks of the Basque Country, a bite of food speared with a toothpick onto a slice of bread and ordered and paid for one by one, apart from the drinks. Seen as a cornerstone of Basque social life, they fill the bars around the Casco Viejo quarter.
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