To your left, you will see the park unfolding with paved walkways curving gently past lush green lawns and a distinct white vintage style lamppost. This is Casilda Iturrizar Park. Its very existence is tied to a woman whose life reads like an improbable novel. Born into poverty in 1818 in a humble Bilbao neighborhood, Casilda Margarita de Iturrizar lived a quiet life until, at the age of forty one, she married Tomás José de Epalza. He was a wealthy businessman who helped found the Bank of Bilbao. When she was widowed in 1873, she inherited a staggering fortune. Instead of hoarding it, she stepped out of the shadows to become the city's greatest philanthropist. She devoted her immense wealth to improving the lives of the working class, eventually donating the very land you are looking at right now.
In 1907, city planners transformed her gift into a magnificent English style garden, a landscape specifically designed to look like idealized, untamed nature rather than rigid geometric patterns. They planted over one thousand five hundred trees from five continents, creating a living museum where native oaks stand beside exotic camphor trees from Asia. The Fine Arts Museum we passed a few minutes ago was actually built entirely within these expansive grounds in the 1940s.
Yet, as you walk these beautiful paths, you are moving through a space defined by erasure. Despite her incredible generosity, Casilda was methodically forgotten. A 2025 scientific study by researcher Garazi López de Aguileta proved that Casilda was doubly invisibilized by history. First, she suffered the standard erasure common for women in a male dominated era. But the second erasure was purely political. Casilda was deeply conservative and fiercely religious. That made her a highly uncomfortable figure for modern progressive movements to champion. Because she did not fit the desired narrative of later generations, her story was quietly dropped, leaving most people who stroll under her trees with no idea who she actually was.
The park itself suffered its own identity crisis as the city's political tides shifted. After the Spanish Civil War, the early Franco dictatorship stripped away its original identity entirely. The authoritarian regime officially renamed it the Park of the Three Nations. This was a direct and dark homage to the fascist governments of Germany, Italy, and Portugal that had supported the military uprising.
It took until 1945 for the park to officially become the Park of Doña Casilda. City officials needed to erase those painful wartime associations, so they moved a marble bust of Casilda from a busy city square into the quiet greenery here. It was a calculated move to anchor her legacy, yet the woman herself remains a ghost in her own garden. Even the iconic central fountain, surrounded by a majestic pergola shaped like a seashell and adorned with stained glass, has lost some of its magic after the city permanently shut off its famous light and sound shows to save money.
Her gift to the city was vast, but over time, even the physical borders of her generosity were encroached upon by the powerful. As we leave the park, our next stop is just a four minute walk away. I will point you toward the Lezama Leguizamon House, a massive mansion that quite literally swallowed up a piece of the very land Casilda gave to the people. Let us head there now.
