Bilbao Audio Tours

Bilbao calls itself 'el botxo,' the hole, because it sits in a narrow river valley surrounded by green mountains on all sides. For most of the twentieth century it was an industrial city of iron and steel, its estuary running dark with pollution. In 1997, Frank Gehry opened the Guggenheim on what had been a derelict dockyard, and the city used that single building as a lever to transform everything. Tourist numbers went from 25,000 in 1995 to nearly a million by 2018. Urban planners now teach the 'Bilbao effect' in universities. The city pulled it off without losing the thing that made it worth transforming in the first place.

The Casco Viejo, the old quarter, has seven original medieval streets known as the Zazpikaleak.

The Gothic cathedral of Santiago sits at one end, San Anton church by the river at the other, and between them are pintxos bars stacked with slices of baguette topped with things that take serious skill to assemble. Pintxos are the Basque version of tapas, eaten standing up with a glass of txakoli, the slightly fizzy local white wine. The ritual of circulating between bars at evening, choosing which counter has the best looking spread, is as important to local life as anything in the museums.