Bilbao's culture runs far deeper than one museum. This three-day route takes in a 10,000-work fine-art collection, Starck's rebuilt wine warehouse, a 19th-century opera house and the mural-covered streets where the city's young artists actually work.
Around 10,000 works spanning 12th-century Catalan panels, El Greco, Goya, Gauguin and Francis Bacon, plus a strong Basque wing built on Zuloaga, Regoyos and Oteiza. Open Wed–Mon 10:00–20:00, closed Tuesdays. A Norman Foster extension is under way.
Bizkaia's public contemporary art space, a large basement kunsthalle beneath Alameda Rekalde that mounts three or four commissioned shows a year by Basque and international artists. No permanent collection, so every visit is different.
Ricardo Bastida's 1909 municipal wine warehouse, gutted and rebuilt by Philippe Starck into a culture house. Its atrium stands on 43 squat columns designed by set designer Lorenzo Baraldi — Roman, Egyptian, Indian, no two alike — under a glass-bottomed rooftop pool.
The main railway station hides a monumental stained-glass window some 15 metres wide above the concourse, made in the 1940s: the Vizcaya Bridge, the Begoña basilica, ironworks and Basque farmhouses rendered in coloured glass over the platforms.
Housed in a 16th-century Jesuit college around a stone cloister, this is the ethnographic record of Basque life: whaling and deep-sea fishing gear, shepherds' tools, diaspora archives, and the Mikeldi, an Iron Age stone animal carved with a disc.
Severino Achúcarro's 1890 building, originally the Sociedad Bilbaína club, now the municipal library. The upper reading room keeps its cast-iron columns, galleries and skylight, and the ground-floor hall hosts free lectures, poetry nights and exhibitions.
Built on the slipways and dry dock of the old Euskalduna shipyard, it tells how the estuary made the city: iron ore exports, shipbuilding, and the collapse that triggered the regeneration. The outdoor dock holds tugs, cranes and the Carola.
Joaquín Rucoba's 1890 neo-baroque theatre on the riverbank, modelled on the Paris Opéra and rebuilt after fire and flood. The season mixes opera, zarzuela, dance and Basque-language drama; guided tours run when the stage is dark.
A deconsecrated 19th-century church in Bilbao La Vieja filled with plaster casts: the Venus de Milo, Michelangelo's Moses, the Parthenon frieze and the Laocoön, made as teaching copies for art students and now oddly moving under the nave's vaulting.
The old red-light quarter across the water is now the city's studio district: commissioned murals along Marzana and Dos de Mayo, artist-run project spaces, secondhand bookshops and small independent galleries wedged between workshops.
Alberto Palacio's 1893 transporter bridge between Portugalete and Getxo, the first of its kind in the world and a UNESCO site since 2006. A suspended gondola ferries cars and passengers across; a lift climbs to the 45-metre upper walkway.
The engine of Basque-language music in Bilbao: a converted cinema running trikitixa sessions, rock in euskara, ska and touring acts most nights, with a daytime café serving pintxos and a bookshop-style counter of local records.