BILBAO


The bigger picture The Guggenheim isn’t the only top-quality Bilbao gallery. Take time to visit the excellent Museo de Bellas Artes, for Basque and Spanish works


“And look,” Paul says, proffering a bottle


of txakoli. “The white wine here is different to San Sebastián’s. We use the same grape, but theirs is sparkling. Ours has no bubbles.” He pours some out for me, the chilled wine causing condensation to form on the glass in seconds. It’s crisp, fruity and sublimely fresh. “No bubbles, just good wine,” says Paul. “That tells you something about Bilbao.”


TAKE ME TO THE RIVER None of which is to say that the city lacks fizz. Bilbao can be showy, even flamboyant at times. Its transformation over recent decades has leſt a very visible legacy, with one particular project standing as a (literally) shining example. When it opened in 1997, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao had the world’s cultural commentators falling over themselves with excitement. Its giant, sinuous, metallic form was likened to a cross between a palace and a ship. Today, over two decades on, the museum remains a world- class attraction, inside and out. Perhaps inevitably, the Guggenheim has


its own Michelin-starred restaurant, Nerua Guggenheim Bilbao. Focused on seasonal Basque ingredients, its best-known dishes include a sole and clam cream soup and a smoked eel ravioli with beetroot and green


apple. Maritime influences are everywhere you turn in this port city, from the set menus to the architecture. I even arrive by overnight ferry, and there aren’t many city-break destinations where you can do that. “It’s hard to explain how much Bilbao


has changed since the 1970s,” guide Miriam Ruíz López tells me as we wander the streets around energetic Plaza Moyúa. Around us, grand hotels look out over trim lawns and curvy, Norman Foster-designed subway entrances. “People know us now for our art and our riverside architecture, but when I was growing up there was an urban myth that the water was so dirty that if you fell in, you’d die.” Bilbao’s long history has been shaped by


its estuary location. From its beginnings in the year 1300, this has always been a city of seafarers, traders and shipbuilders, a place happy to draw its influences from all compass points. At the same time, of course, it’s also somewhere that prides itself on its self-determination. A case in point: the city’s top-flight football team, Athletic Bilbao, famously still employs a Basque-only policy for its player recruitment. In all sorts of respects, Madrid is a distant notion. The produce used by the city’s bars


and restaurants also belongs squarely to the region. At the Mercado de la Ribera,


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