Bilbao's ría: from steel yards to titanium: a self-guided walk
By Alleytale
From steel yards to titanium
The river is the thread: a customs house where ship cargo passed, the riverside where the Euskalduna shipyard once built ships, a shipowner's house and an industrialist's palace, and the glass, titanium and brick that came after.
The stops
Joaquín Rucoba's City Hall took nine years to build, from 1883, and was inaugurated on 17 April 1892. It stands on the site of the Convent of San Agustín, which lay in ruins after the first Carlist war, on the right bank of the Nervión. Inside is the Arab Hall, a richly decorated neo-Mudéjar room whose decoration resembles that of the Alhambra in Granada.
Photo: Fernandopascullo — CC BY-SA 4.0 This customs house dates from 1890 and is the work of the architect Eladio Iturría; the goods that arrived by ship passed through it. Its main facades are eclectic, a mix of neoclassical and Herrerian styles, and it stands on the Uribitarte promenade, opposite the City Hall. After a renovation it was officially opened on 2 November 2020 to bring together some of the central state administration's services for the public.
Photo: Xabier — CC BY-SA 4.0 Isozaki Atea, the Isozaki Gate in Basque, is a complex of buildings led by two twin towers, designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki with the Bilbao architect Iñaki Aurrekoetxea and completed in 2008. It was meant to link the Ensanche district and the river. Santiago Calatrava's white Zubizuri footbridge, opened in 1997, lands at the Uribitarte dock rather than the higher street above, and a footway now connects it to the staircase between the two towers.
Photo: Zarateman — CC0 The architect Gregorio Ibarretxe built this neo-Basque house in 1900 as the residence of the shipowner and industrialist Ramón de la Sota. It is now the official seat of Athletic Club, inaugurated as the club's headquarters on 22 August 1988.
Photo: Javi Guerra Hernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 Jeff Koons's Puppy is a 12.4-metre West Highland White Terrier covered with some 38,000 plants, typically begonias, impatiens, marigolds and petunias, which are replaced twice a year while an internal irrigation system waters them. The Guggenheim Foundation bought the sculpture, and it was transported to Spain in September 1997 for the opening of the museum.
Photo: Jules Verne Times Two — CC BY-SA 4.0 Frank Gehry's museum was inaugurated on 18 October 1997 by King Juan Carlos I, alongside the Nervión in a run-down port area that had once been the city's main source of income. Its skin is made of 33,000 titanium plates, only 0.4 mm thick, laid like scales over a galvanized steel structure, and the base is covered in beige limestone from quarries near Granada. Its impact on the city became known as the Bilbao effect.
Photo: PA — CC BY-SA 4.0 César Pelli designed this 165-metre tower, built as the headquarters of Iberdrola and the tallest building in the Basque Country. It stands in Abandoibarra, a former industrial area beside the Nervión, and King Juan Carlos I inaugurated it on 21 February 2012.
Photo: Javi Guerra Hernando — CC BY-SA 4.0 The architects Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios designed this congress centre and concert hall, opened in 1999 on land the Euskalduna shipyard once occupied. The yard was founded in 1900 by the shipping merchants Ramón de la Sota y Llano and Eduardo Aznar y de la Sota, grew to have facilities for ships of 12,000 tonnes, and was closed after state restructuring. The main auditorium seats 2,164, and the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra is based here.
Photo: PA — CC BY-SA 4.0 The Itsasmuseum opened on 20 November 2003 on the site of the former Euskalduna shipyard. After the yard closed, its dry docks, its pump house and the crane called Carola became part of the museum. Carola is a stork-type crane built between 1954 and 1957, with its control cabin 35 metres above the ground and its jib platform at 60 metres, and it is the museum's symbolic draw.
Photo: PA — CC BY-SA 4.0 The park was created in 1907 and is named after Casilda Iturrizar (1818 to 1900), a prominent philanthropist who donated the land. It has a duck pond, which gave it the local nickname Parque de los Patos, a fountain ringed by a shaded pergola that stages sound and light shows on holidays, and an English-style garden with century-old trees.
Photo: Zarateman — CC BY-SA 4.0 The museum was founded in 1908 and opened its doors in 1914, and its neoclassical building, designed by Fernando Urrutia and Gonzalo Cárdenas, was completed in 1945. An extension finished in November 2001, and the whole museum stands inside Doña Casilda Iturrizar Park. Its collection of more than ten thousand works includes classical art by Cranach, El Greco, Van Dyck and Goya.
Photo: IGOLEA — CC BY-SA 4.0 This palace was built in the late nineteenth century for Víctor Chávarri and his brother Benigno, in an eclectic style inspired by Flemish revivals, and none of its sets of windows is the same as another. Víctor was an industrialist who founded La Vizcaya, a company that later merged with two others to form Altos Hornos de Vizcaya. Today the palace is home to the representation of the Spanish government in the province of Biscay.
Photo: Zarateman — CC BY-SA 4.0 Ricardo Bastida designed this wine warehouse, built between 1905 and 1909. It was abandoned in the 1970s, when a new warehouse was planned, and the designer Philippe Starck later turned it into a civic and cultural centre that opened in 2010 behind the preserved facade. Inside he set three brick-clad cubes on 43 different columns, and since 2015 the building has carried the name Azkuna Zentroa, in tribute to the late mayor Iñaki Azkuna.
Photo: Андрей Романенко — CC BY-SA 4.0
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