In front of you is a tall corner apartment house of stone and brick, shaped around a chamfered edge, with wavy iron balconies and a crown of dormer windows peeking above a balustrade.
Now here is Bilbao playing a delightful trick on the eye. Architecture around Abando often invites misreading, and those mistakes tell you what people hope to find. Generations of locals have looked at this façade, seen the curves, the plant-like ornament, the ironwork, and said, “Ah... Gaudí.” Even now, people still call it Casa Gaudí. Fair guess, wrong city.
This is Casa Montero, finished in nineteen oh two, and it is the great oddball of Bilbao housing: the city’s singular residential modernist landmark. Most of the grand buildings around here speak in orderly, upright voices. This one sways a little at the hips. It uses stone ashlar, brick, cast-iron columns and beams, and wood, but the real magic is how the façade refuses to stand stiffly. The windows, balconies, and bay windows ripple across the two street fronts, and that chamfered corner turns the whole building into a kind of urban prow.
Take a moment and study the façade closely... the balconies, the curves, the carved surrounds, the silhouette at the top. Which bit would have convinced you that Gaudí must have had a hand in it?
Here is the part most visitors miss. Luis Aladrén Mendivil began the project, but he died before the façades were fully finished. Jean Batiste Darroquy then took over construction and fixed the final exterior silhouette people recognize today. So the building’s mistaken identity is almost built into its history: one architect started it, another shaped the face Bilbao remembers, and the city attached a third, famous name by myth alone. Municipal records are clear about it... Gaudí never built here.
You can see Darroquy’s hand in the sinuous feel of the place. Look especially at the balusters on the second and third floors - those short little railing columns - where the lines bend and loosen. Down at street level, the ground floor has rusticated stone, cut to look chunky and deeply grooved, and the main entrance on Alameda de Recalde sits under a straight lintel with an oversized keystone pushing forward like a proud nose.
Casa Montero kept changing roles, too. Athletic Club placed its offices here in the nineteen eighties, and artist Sara Odriozola worked inside on decorative commissions. Even painter Mari Puri Herrero remembered part of her childhood around this house. So this is not just a photographed façade. It is a building Bilbao has kept reusing, reimagining, and occasionally misnaming.
Hold on to that sharper eye for style and status. In about a minute, Chavarri Palace shows you how the city’s elite told a very different story with stone.
