Spain and Portugal for Visitors

A hostel (as opposed to hostal) with ISO 9002 certification.

Bilbao's most important fiestas, its version of the Semana Grande, including the Basque Strongman Games, begin on the third Saturday of every August.

Bilbao's football team receives unconditional support from locals. Until relatively recently, all its players were from the Basque Country.

In Bilbao's casco viejo, the Basque Museum is a modest but entertaining affair (and a welcome relief after the pretentiousness of the Guggenheim). Its full name is "Museum of Archaeology of Bizkaia and Basque Ethnography" and in places its intentions are a little iffy, much of the Basque identity being built on some very dodgy ideas put together as a near mythology in the nineteenth century, in other words, old-fashioned nationalism - you'll see a very unorthodox slant on the Carlist Wars, for example. If you overlook that kind of thing (and you should), the Basque Museum is thoroughly entertaining, and a fine place to escape from the rain for an hour or so.

Bilbao's municipal site is confused and confusing, though the information is in there, somewhere.

A number of Bilbao's historic cafés, opened at the height of its turn-of-the-twentieth-century prosperity, were bought up and lovingly restored by the same businessman. The oldest of these is the Café Boulevard, 1871, which was closed for many years, but the most emblematic is the very central Café Iruña, 1903, with its characteristic mudéjar-style decoration. Everyone who visits Bilbao should enter it at least once.

A website which will not win prizes. The English-language content is limited and what is in Spanish is not very enticing.

Spanish-only portal. Click "Conoce Bilbao" for a rather good but still Spanish-only guide to the city, then "FotoTour" for the pics.

Bilbao's new metropolitan railway connects it with the seaside towns east of the Nervión estuary and the historically working-class populations west of the river such as Barrakaldo.

Fine municipal tourist information site.

Winsome site from one of Bilbao's traditional cafés. I particularly like the antique photographs.

Bilbao's historic quarter is actually a little removed from the present-day city centre, on the other side of the River Nervión. This is the site of a shopkeepers' association and is fine, except for the machine translation, which leads to comical but near incomprehensible English. For example, "casco viejo" is literally translated as "old helmet" instead of "historic centre."

Bilbao's old, hair-raisingly located Sondika Airport has been replaced by this ultra-modern construction, designed by Santiago Calatrava. If Spain had an architect laureate, it would be Calatrava.

To quote this website, "The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum collection currently boasts more than six thousand works including paintings, sculptures, drawings, engravings and objects from the decorative arts."

Local station with some confusingly presented and even more confusingly translated English-language content on its website. Click the "Conocer Bilbao" link at the bottom for a largely incomprehensible city guide.

Local radio station with a Spanish-only website.

Online guide to Bilbao, which – in addition to offering details about how to organize a trip to Bilbao – provides information on the possibilities of the city and its surrounding area, with links to more than 200 websites with specific information on different topics such as weather, hotels and other lodgings, pintxos (the Basque version of tapas) and other gastronomical points of interest, beaches, the countryside, local festivals and more.