Nine days in northern Spain: green, rainy, and nothing like the country on the postcards

Arrive, drop the bag, and walk into the old town in the late afternoon, which is when it starts. It is only eight streets deep, so the way to see it is to circle it with a drink in hand.

The Plaza de la Constitución is the middle of everything: an arcaded square with numbers painted above the balconies, from the years when it was used as a bullring and the flats around it were sold as seats.

Eat at about eight and plan on three or four bars, one plate in each, taking whatever the place is known for.

Start at the San Telmo museum, a sixteenth century Dominican convent with a perforated metal extension bolted onto it. The collection covers Basque history and painting, and the old church is hung with enormous gold and grey canvases by Josep Maria Sert.

Behind it a path climbs Monte Urgull in about twenty minutes, up through the trees to a fort with gun batteries in its walls and a twelve metre statue of Christ on the roof looking out over the bay.

Then the beach. La Concha runs a kilometre and a half of flat sand, sheltered by the island in the middle of the bay, and swimming in the middle of a city is what people remember about this place. In the evening, cross the river to the Kursaal, two glass cubes on the sand that glow from inside after dark.

Walk east this morning. From the end of the Zurriola beach a path climbs Monte Ulia through pines onto cliffs above the sea, with the bay behind you and the coast running away towards France. Forty minutes up, and you will meet more dogs than people.

Back in the middle of town, the cathedral of Buen Pastor was finished in 1897, when the city was rich and growing, and its spire is still the tallest thing here.

Give the evening back to the bars, and if there is one to plan, make it a table rather than a counter: this is the night for grilled turbot or a whole spider crab.

The coach takes about seventy five minutes along the coast and drops you at Bilbao Intermodal, twenty minutes' walk or one metro stop from the old town. Go in the morning and you have the whole afternoon.

The Casco Viejo is seven parallel streets on the flat ground by the river, and it holds most of the city's bars. Start in the Plaza Nueva, a closed neoclassical square begun in 1829, where the arcade is solid with counters and the Academy of the Basque Language has the building on one side.

Then down to the river for the market, which is a proper working one in the morning and has a counter floor upstairs for the rest of the day. Bilbao's pintxos are cheaper than San Sebastián's and, some people will tell you, better.

Book the museum ahead and go early, before the coaches and while the light is still low on the titanium. Walk the outside first, along the river and back underneath the bridge, because the building is the exhibit. Inside, the Richard Serra steel spirals are permanent and walking through them is what most people remember.

Fifteen minutes uphill, through the Doña Casilda park, the Museo de Bellas Artes holds six thousand works from the Romanesque onwards, with El Greco, Zurbarán and Goya alongside a room of Basque painters that hardly anyone visits. It has been in the middle of a large extension since 2023, so check what is open.

That leaves the evening for the Ensanche, the boulevard city built with iron money, and a slower dinner than the counters allow.

Take the metro out to the mouth of the river, where the money was made. The Vizcaya Bridge opened in 1893, the first transporter bridge ever built, and it still carries cars and passengers over the water in a gondola slung under the span. Ride it, then walk the promenades on either bank.

Back in town, the maritime museum sits in the dry docks of the Euskalduna shipyard, which launched the last ships built in Bilbao before it closed in the 1980s. The outdoor half, with the docks and the cranes, is the better half.

Finish at Azkuna Zentroa, a 1909 wine warehouse gutted by Philippe Starck into a library, cinema, bars and a rooftop pool with a glass floor. The ground floor is a forest of forty three columns, no two the same, and it costs nothing to walk through.

A travel day. The flight from Bilbao is little more than an hour and the bus in from Santiago's airport another thirty, which puts you in the old town by the middle of the afternoon.

Walk straight to the Praza do Obradoiro. Arriving here on foot is what a million people a year do the hard way, some of them having walked from the Pyrenees, and the square in front of the cathedral is where they sit down, take their boots off and look up.

The cathedral itself was begun in 1075 and consecrated in 1211, and each of its four faces opens onto a different square. Go in through the Obradoiro front, which is eighteenth century baroque with a pair of enormous towers, and give the rest of the day to the streets behind it.

The monastery of San Martiño Pinario stands directly behind the cathedral and is almost as big. It was Benedictine, rebuilt in the sixteenth century, closed in the nineteenth and is now a seminary with a museum, a vast baroque altarpiece and choir stalls that are worth the entrance on their own. Part of it takes guests, which makes it the cheapest grand address in the city.

In the afternoon walk out through the market and up to Bonaval, where a Dominican convent has held the Museum of the Galician People since 1977. Fishing, farming, weaving, bagpipes and shoes, plus a staircase of three separate spirals that rise around each other without touching, and a cemetery of Galician writers in the cloister.

Eat well tonight. Santiago is a small city with an unreasonable number of good kitchens, and this is the night for one of them.

A last morning, and a strange one. On a hill on the edge of town, Peter Eisenman's Cidade da Cultura is a set of enormous stone waves meant to echo the shape of the old city, built with a bespoke frame for almost every window and a budget that ran away entirely. Half the complex was cancelled; what stands is a library, an archive, a museum and a view back over Santiago.

It is on the way to the airport, which is the practical reason to end here, and it is a good last argument for this coast: ambitious, a bit mad, and nothing like the rest of Spain.

Then the bus, and home.