Four days in Bilbao: a shipbuilding town that bet everything on one building, and won

Three nights in the Basque Country: the Guggenheim and the museum next door, seven medieval streets full of pintxos bars, a transporter bridge downriver, and a hill with the whole city under it.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Bilbao
Places
11 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Bilbao spent a century making steel and ships, and then the yards closed and the river went quiet. What happened next is the reason people now come: the city spent its way out, cleaned the Nervión, moved the port downstream and put a Frank Gehry museum where the docks had been. It opened in 1997, and it worked so completely that town planners the world over now talk about the Bilbao effect and try, mostly without success, to repeat it.

None of which is why you will enjoy being here. Bilbao is Basque first, mild, green and often wet, built into a fold of hills where the rain arrives sideways and nobody comments on it. It is a city of about 350,000 with a million in the valley around it, and it eats better per euro than anywhere else in Spain. The counters of the old town are laid out with pintxos, small plated things on bread, and the correct way to work a Basque bar is to have one and one glass and then leave for the next one.

Four days is right. One for the old town, one for the Guggenheim and the fine arts museum a few streets from it, one to go downriver to the sea, and a last morning on the hill. Distances are short, the metro is quick, and the whole centre is walkable if you accept a few climbs.

Highlights

  • Titanium panels that change colour with the weather, which in Bilbao means they change all day
  • A West Highland terrier twelve metres tall, planted with flowers, replanted every season
  • Seven medieval streets where dinner is eight small plates in five different bars
  • A bridge from 1893 that carries cars across the river in a gondola hanging from a girder
  • A basilica on a hill you reach by lift, with the Casco Viejo roofs laid out under it

Where to stay

Bilbao, three nights

Three nights puts you in the old town or the Ensanche, the nineteenth century grid across the river. The Casco Viejo is louder and better for eating; the Ensanche is quieter and closer to the museums. Both are ten minutes from the other on foot.

The city divides neatly. East of the river is medieval and full of bars, west is the boulevard city built on iron money, and downstream is where the cranes used to be. All three fit in four days without hurrying.

Day by day

Day 1 in Bilbao

Plaza Nueva, the cathedral and the Ribera market

Start in the Casco Viejo, which is small enough to lose the map in. The core of it is the Siete Calles, the seven parallel streets that were once the whole of medieval Bilbao, and they are still the address for most of the city's bars.

Do it in the order below and you will end up at the market at the right time of day, with an afternoon left over for wandering back up through the streets you missed.

  1. 10:30

    Plaza Nueva

    Historic

    A closed neoclassical square of sixty four arches, begun in 1829 and finished twenty years later to the day. The Academy of the Basque Language has the old provincial building on one side and the arcade underneath is solid with bars.

  2. 11:45

    Cathedral of St. James (Santiago)

    Religious

    Bilbao's Gothic cathedral, fourteenth century and dedicated to Saint James, with a small cloister and a pilgrim porch: the coastal Camino passes the door on its way west.

  3. 13:00

    Pintxos along Calle del Perro

    Eat

    Two or three bars, one plate and one glass in each, standing up. Cod, mushrooms, anything with a skewer through it.

  4. 15:00

    Mercado de la Ribera

    Other

    The riverside market, rebuilt in 1929 on the site of the medieval one and stacked over three floors. Fish and produce downstairs in the morning, a counter floor above where you can eat what is on the slab.

With more time: The Iglesia de San Antón is a two minute walk on, a fifteenth century church on the ruins of a castle that the city put on its own coat of arms, with the bridge beside it. Cross that bridge for the steep streets of Bilbao la Vieja, where the newer bars are.

Day 2 in Bilbao

The Guggenheim, Puppy and the Museo de Bellas Artes

Book the Guggenheim ahead and go early: the building is best seen before the coach parties, and the light on the titanium is better with the sun still low. Allow two hours inside, more if the temporary show is a big one. Richard Serra's steel spirals in the long gallery are permanent, and walking inside them is the single thing most people remember.

Then walk fifteen minutes up to the Museo de Bellas Artes, which most visitors skip and should not. Its collection runs from the twelfth century to now, with El Greco, Zurbarán and Goya alongside a strong Basque room. It has been in the middle of a large extension since 2023, so check what is open before you go.

Both sit in the same green strip, and the walk between them goes through Doña Casilda park.

  1. 09:30

    Guggenheim Museum

    Culture

    Gehry's titanium ship, opened in 1997 and still the reason most people book a flight here. Go round the outside first, along the river and back under the bridge, before you go in.

  2. 12:05

    Puppy

    Other

    Jeff Koons's twelve metre terrier stands in the forecourt, planted with bedding flowers that are changed every season. It was meant to be temporary.

  3. 13:30

    Lunch in the Ensanche

    Eat

    The streets behind Plaza Moyúa do a proper menú del día for well under twenty euros, which is what the office workers around you are eating.

  4. 15:00

    Museo de Bellas Artes

    Historic

    Six thousand works from the Romanesque to the present, and the Basque painters are the surprise: Zuloaga, Regoyos and Iturrino in rooms almost nobody else is in.

With more time: The Palacio de la Diputación on the Gran Vía is a five minute detour from lunch, a heavily gilded 1900 seat of provincial government with stained glass to match. Otherwise the evening belongs to the bars around Plaza Nueva again.

Day 3 in Bilbao

Downriver to the Vizcaya Bridge, then the Itsasmuseum

The Nervión is why Bilbao exists, and the ten kilometres between the city and the sea are where the money was made. Take the metro out to Areeta or Portugalete, ride the bridge across, and walk the promenades on either bank.

Come back for the maritime museum, which occupies the dry docks of the Euskalduna yard: the last ships built in Bilbao were launched here and the yard closed in the 1980s after a long and bitter fight. The outdoor half, with the docks and the cranes, is the better half.

Finish in the middle of town at Azkuna Zentroa, a 1909 wine warehouse gutted and refitted by Philippe Starck, where the ground floor is a forest of forty three columns and no two are alike.

  1. 10:00

    Vizcaya Bridge

    Architecture

    The first transporter bridge ever built, opened in 1893 and on the UNESCO list. A gondola hangs from the girder and shuttles cars and people across in a couple of minutes; the walkway on top is a separate ticket and a long way up.

  2. 13:00

    Lunch in Getxo or Portugalete

    Eat

    Both banks have terraces by the water. Getxo's side is the smarter one, Portugalete's the more local.

  3. 15:00

    Itsasmuseum

    Culture

    The maritime museum in the old Euskalduna shipyard, most of it outdoors across three dry docks. Small boats, a floating crane, and the story of what the river did before it did art.

  4. 17:30

    Azkuna Zentroa

    Historic

    A brick wine warehouse turned into a public building: library, cinema, cafes and a rooftop pool with a glass floor you can stand under. Free to walk through, and the columns alone are worth the detour.

With more time: With more time on the coast, stay out at the mouth of the river: the beach at Ereaga is a few minutes from the bridge, and Sopelana further along has the surf. The Euskotren line to Guernica takes about an hour and is the other obvious day out.

Day 4 in Bilbao

Begoña and the Etxebarria park

The hill behind the old town is the last thing to do and the easiest, because a public lift does the climbing. Take it from Casco Viejo up to Begoña, look at the basilica the city is genuinely attached to, then walk the ridge back down through the park.

It is an hour and a half at a stroll, which leaves the afternoon for the airport or a last plate at a counter.

  1. 10:00

    Basílica de Begoña

    Religious

    Bilbao's own church, sixteenth century, wrecked in the Carlist wars and given its tower back in the 1900s. The Virgin here is the city's patron and the football team's, which in Bilbao is much the same thing.

  2. 11:00

    Parque Etxebarria

    Leisure

    A park built in the 1980s on a demolished steelworks, with the factory chimney left standing in the middle of it. The view over the old town roofs is the best in the city, and free.

With more time: If the flight is late, the Basque Museum is on the way back down: a 1921 collection of prehistory, ethnography and Basque history, plainly presented, with a pre-Roman stone animal in the cloister that nobody can agree about.

Before you go

Getting in

Bilbao Airport sits a short way north of the city in a white Calatrava terminal that locals call La Paloma. The A3247 bus runs from outside arrivals to the Termibus interchange and on into town in about half an hour for a few euros. Ryanair, Vueling and the legacy carriers all fly in from across Europe.

Trains from Madrid take around five hours into Abando, the terminus in the middle of town, and it is worth walking on to the platforms even if you are not travelling: the end wall is a huge stained glass window of Basque trades. Buses are the better bet for anywhere along the north coast, and they are cheaper and more frequent than the trains. San Sebastián is about an hour, Santander seventy five minutes, Vitoria an hour, all from Bilbao Intermodal, which everyone still calls the Termibus.

For San Sebastián specifically, look at the Pesa coaches rather than the narrow gauge Euskotren line, which is pretty and takes more than twice as long.

Getting around

Walk. The Casco Viejo, the Ensanche and the riverside museums are within a couple of kilometres of each other, and the walk along the Nervión between them is the nicest part of the city.

For anything further, the metro is fast and clean, with glass entrance canopies by Norman Foster that the city nicknamed fosteritos. A Barik card is shared across the metro, the tram, the city buses, Euskotren and the local Renfe trains, and it cuts the fare on all of them. Buy one and load it if you are here more than a day.

Do not drive. The centre is hilly, one way and under a low emission zone, and there is nothing you would use a car for.

When to go

This is the wet side of Spain. Winters rarely freeze and summers rarely pass the mid twenties, which makes Bilbao a relief in August when Seville is unliveable, and it also means you should assume rain in any month. The fine drizzle has its own word here, sirimiri, which tells you how often it turns up.

The city's own week is Aste Nagusia in late August, nine days of concerts, cooking competitions and crowds along the river. Prices rise and rooms go early.

Eating

Pintxos are the point. Bars in the Casco Viejo and around Plaza Nueva lay their counters with them from about noon and again from eight, and you pay at the end by telling the barman what you had. Order a zurito, a small beer, or a glass of txakoli, the sharp green wine they pour from a height.

Lunch is late, from two, and dinner is later, from nine. If you turn up at seven you will be eating alone. The Ribera market has a counter floor upstairs that opens earlier and is a reasonable way around that.

Bilbao is the rare city that reinvented itself without becoming a theme park about it. The museum is genuinely good and the town around it is better: wet, green, cheap to eat in, and not much bothered about what you make of it.

Give it four days and you will spend the last one wondering how to fit the coast in as well.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

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Common questions

Is Bilbao worth four days, or is it a day trip from San Sebastián?
Four days is comfortable and three is enough. Treating it as a day trip means seeing the Guggenheim and nothing else, which misses the old town, the river and the food, all of which are better here than the museum queue suggests.
Do I need to book the Guggenheim?
Book online for a morning slot, particularly in summer and at weekends. The building itself is free to walk around, and the riverside path underneath it is the best view of it.
How do pintxos work?
Stand at the counter, take what you want or ask for the hot ones from the kitchen list, and keep a tally in your head. You pay when you leave. One or two per bar and then move on: nobody sits down for a whole meal.
What is the best day trip from Bilbao?
Guernica, an hour on the Euskotren, for the Assembly House and the oak that the Basque provinces swore their charters under. The town was bombed flat in 1937 and rebuilt; Picasso's painting of it hangs in Madrid, not here. San Juan de Gaztelugatxe, the chapel on a rock reached by a long stone staircase, is the other one, and it needs a booked ticket.
Should I speak Spanish or Basque?
Spanish is understood everywhere and most conversation happens in it. Basque is unrelated to any other living language and nobody expects you to have any, but eskerrik asko for thank you is noticed and appreciated.
Can I copy this itinerary and change it?
Yes. Copy it into your own trip, then move the days around, add the beaches or the Guernica trip, and delete whatever you would not do.

Places and coordinates are drawn from Wikivoyage, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0: Bilbao.