Ishay Govender-Ypma. The region is famous for its fine-dining restaurants and pintxo-decked eateries, where you select a toothpick-skewered snack from a dizzying array on bar counters and move on to the next until your appetite is stimulated sufficiently for a late dinner. I want to enjoy it all: the famous fried Guernica green chilli peppers at low-key neighbourhood bars, Michelin-starred cuisine at Mugaritz, Etxebarri, Arzak and Azurmendi, and the best of Basque design and striking architecture.
To this end, I base myself in Bilbao and, later, San Sebastian, or Donostia, as it’s known locally. Before architect Frank Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim Museum was constructed in 1997, Bilbao was still a dozy shipping and industrial hub known for its iron mines, slinking beneath the frequent fog and drizzle that sheaths the city.
The museum’s shimmer of metallic ribbons are as dramatic as a Balenciaga haute couture frock, and curves that shimmy as you circumnavigate the building give way to what ultimately resembles a ship – a fitting symbol for the port city.
Incidentally, the city’s concert and conference hall, Euskalduna Palacio, which hosted more than 1,000 guests for the World’s 50 Best Restaurant awards in June and was built by Madrid-Basque duo Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios, resembles a ship under construction, an ode to the space’s former purpose.
The Guggenheim, when seen from near the rouge arch of the Puente de la Salve on a sunny afternoon, or early evening in summer when the skies are cloudless and that rare deep blue, makes me feel as if I am standing on a platform, waving goodbye to a fantasy ship with titanium fish scales.
A glass-and-steel tower behind the bridge resembles a sail. When viewed from Mount Artxanda, reached by a funicular first built at the turn of the 19th century, the Guggenheim contrasts, but only just, against the sedate buildings that dot the city’s landscape, with verdant hills enclosing it.
The Iberdrola Tower also defies the uniformity, rising above traditional terracotta roofs. To get to the funicular, you can walk up the pedestrian footbridge, Zubizuri, created by architect Santiago Calatrava, which resembles a brilliant white sail that fans over the Nervion River.
Tour guide and interior designer Alfonso de Lecea tells me that many residents were incensed when the Guggenheim was being built: “Too ostentatious, too out of place,” they said.
Now, not only are locals immensely proud, but they can see how the design, two decades down the line, remains timeless, elegant, thrilling even. “And still, no leaks,” De Lecea, who has given tours to art lovers the world over, says with a smile. As of last year, it had attracted 1.3 million visitors.
The “Bilbao Effect”, a term referring to a landmark architectural piece paid for by a city having the power to uplift the economy, has been widely discussed and replicated. The city is now one of the wealthiest in Spain. Grabbing my attention at the museum are Richard Serra’s Matter of Time, a permanent installation on the cavernous ground floor, the Art and China After 1989 hall, and Joana Vasconcelos’ Egeria, representing the female guardian, a multihued textile installation spreading through the atrium.
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