Bilbao, Basque Country, Spain
Today is our second day in Basque Country (Euskadi) and our first day in Spain. In the morning we entered the mouth of the river Nervión and went alongside in Getxo (in Basque the “tx” is pronounced like the English “ch”). We then drove the short distance along the river to Bilbao, the capital of Basque country, to visit the famous Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao was for many years the industrial capital of northern Spain and was, by all accounts, a bleak city with steel mills and shipyards lining a very polluted river. Today the transformation has been nothing short of remarkable. The city has removed the heavy industry, cleaned it up and concentrated it downstream. They have cleaned up the river and built an entirely new city along the banks. From the viewpoint overlooking the city in the mountain area of Artxanda, where there are now many restaurants and where the people of Bilbao like to take their families to eat, the city gleams below along both banks of the river.
The centerpiece of all this urban renewal is, of course, the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. The museum is itself a work of art and it houses some monumental pieces. We were shown the huge steel plates of Richard Serra, which have been made from shipbuilding COR-TEN steel and rolled in shipyards and steel mills. The plates are about 2” thick, 10’-12’ high and 30’-40’ long. They sit on the floor without support and walking among them produced interesting psychological reactions among us. Certainly no one was untouched by these monumental steel structures, even though we were firmly cautioned not to touch them.
This entire area of the Euskadi and west to Galicia is called “Green Spain” and is framed by the Cantabrian mountains, which continue the line of the Pyrenees, but which were formed much earlier in geological history. The range blocks moisture-laden air blowing south off the Bay of Biscay and produces a rain shadow which keeps the Iberian Massif to the south quite dry. We very much enjoyed hearing about the unique aspects of Basque culture and the Basque language which is unrelated to any Indo-European language stock and seems to be a very old remnant of a language spoken in this part of the world before the Celtic or Romance tongues arrived.
