The Basque Country’s biggest and busiest city, Bilbao lies on Ría Nervión and is neatly wedged into the green hills of Vizcaya province. At its heart it is sliced in two by the murky waters of Ría de Bilbao, the Nervión’s channel to the sea.
Bilbaínos (residents of Bilbao) have long called their city the botxo, the ‘orifice’, an ironic and affectionate multimetaphor for the city’s topography and its once-ugly industrial sprawl. Post-industrial decline into an even deeper black hole seemed to be Bilbao’s fate during the late 20th century. Yet by the 1990s visionary planning, and Bilbao’s tradition of hard work, saw the city well on the way to reinventing itself as a 21st-century metropolis, even before Frank Gehry’s iconic Museo Guggenheim gave it international cultural status. Bilbaínos appreciate ‘El Goog’, but they know also that their city was going places anyway.
Today, Bilbao throngs with sophisticated yet earthy locals, its cuisine is positively lip-smacking, there’s nonstop partying if you want to burn out in style, and a rich Basque culture more than matches the internationalism of the Guggenheim.
