Barcelona to Bilbao

Barcelona to Bilbao – Sunday 10^th July

Unlike Bruce, I sleep well and wake at half-six in very hilly country. We’d left the sea and crowds around 1am. The shower is quaint and satisfactory, but it will be a long day.

We find our hotel, but the booking was made for 11^th June not 11^th July. They find us a room where we rest for an hour before heading out. We brave the underground, after we found it, signing is ‘discreet’. We make our way to the old part of town in the hope of finding breakfast. It is early Sunday (9am) and very little is open, but we settle for a small café and have a pastry and coffee.

We walk along the river and find the Guggenheim museum, our sole purpose for coming to Bilbao. The architecture is amazing, awesome, inspiring. Light coloured stone, glass and metal. We learn they are sandstone and titanium.

As with La Pedrera in Barcelona, the free audio guide is fantastic. It takes us through the architecture inside and out as well as the ‘Walk Through Time’ exhibition.

I find the American Expressionism hard to understand but appreciate the huge amount of space allowed for these exhibitions.

The temporary exhibit is on the Aztecs and it is enormous. We spend hours looking at it. Obviously there is a great affinity with the Spanish conquerors, especially Cortez, and the Aztecs who succumbed so easily. I don’t believe we’d ever see an exhibition in such detail in Australia.

Today we have taken approximately 16,000 steps and we are exhausted. It is Sunday and we struggle to find somewhere to eat a meal. Once again, lots of beer and wine and standing at bars. We settle on a restaurant near our hotel. Bruce has cockles, satisfactory but small. I have cod with Biscay sauce – very ordinary.

Bilbao – Monday 11^th June

After Gaudi and Picasso in Barcelona and Ghery in Bilbao we are museumed out, so we take the metro to Neguri. We find a sea-side village, big houses and a sandy beach full of people, mostly women.

It is very picturesque and we enjoy walking along the seafront, up thorough the fishing village to view the bay, then down though the park and on to the harbour.

The beach looks out over a very industrialised harbour at the mouth of the ‘Ria de Bilbao’. Bilbao has saved its city by moving the wharves and associated industry further down to the mouth of the estuary. There are fish in the river and the Guggenheim and Conference Centre have been built where the wharves were.

We face an eating dilemma again. It is 1:30pm and we are starving. We order wine and beer and a bowl of olives at an outside café in the harbour area and wait. Eventually, at 2:30 some people come in and order food – phew!

We share a paella-for-two, which is far nicer than my Barcelona tourista one, and a bottle of wine. We are entertained by a couple dressed in matching turquoise and cream with a very young baby in an orange and black pram. My guess is right – they are very proud grandparents and fuss over the baby boy and a huge 4-course sea food meal, including crab which was brought out to be examined and weighed before it was cooked.

Lunch finishes at 4:30 and it is still very warm. We walk along the breakwater. There is another being built and we are fascinated. We stop and watch the truck bring soil, the barge pumping something black and the earthmovers moving boulders. There is so much construction going on.

We walk along the front to the next village Getxo, past some magnificent houses, some with enormous gardens, and the locals sitting and watching the water. Seems to be a favourite pastime.

We find the famous Transporter Bridge ‘Puente Transbordador’, a suspended trolley, crossing the river, then realise there is no metro nearby, so we take the bus back to Bilbao.

After a rest, at 9:30pm we go Tapas hunting and finally get our eating sorted out – big breakfast, lunch at 2:30 and snacks at 9:30. We eat local prosciutto rolls, bread with egg and mayonnaise topping, olives and chillies. We finish with a nightcap in the hotel bar.