three days in bilbao

a travel diary

I went to San Sebastián and Bilbao with my best friend some weeks ago, and by weeks I definitely mean months. The way time languishes in summer is literally none of my business.

If you’ve been here long enough, you might recall I went to San Sebastián last year in February and froze my ass off, because there’s nothing I love more than an off-peak jaunt to a popular destination.¹ Did I underestimate just how off-peak it would be, given I was the one and only pintxos tour attendee and essentially ended up on a date with the guide? Sure. I wrote about it here:

a relatively unhinged travel diary

Here’s a snippet, in re the pintxos tour:

At the beginning of the tour, we stop at a market and the guide—who is, to be clear, very nice—tells me that the cheese she’s offering me is vegan because it is made of goat milk, from goats that live freely their whole lives and are cremated when they die (“so they are not sacrificed,” she adds helpfully). So much effort has gone into this story, I am powerless against its logic. I eat a piece of the cheese. Later, my stomach suggests I should’ve demurred. The unbothered goats, though, got me.

I actually just re-read it in full and remembered how much I love travel writing, and why I memorialize my activities with the intense detail of an overzealous historian.

All this to say, though, that given how San Sebastián hasn’t changed much over the last fifteen months, I’ll be focusing on Bilbao today.²

I had literally no idea what to expect from the Basque capital, given the approximately zero minutes I spent researching prior to this trip, but I loved it. A proper city, beautifully walkable, with wonderful food and bars and museums and parks and a metro system! Lots to see, but easy to navigate within a few days, which is how this travel diary ended up the length of a short treatise.

Onwards.

***

We arrived on one of the warmest days of the summer, and we thought we were prepared because it had been rather hot in San Sebastián, too, but the thing about Bilbao is: no beach. Starting out your day by disassociating for a couple of hours by the water is an activity containing the sort of mystical, magical, miraculous properties that led to all those doctors prescribing The Sea to all the depressed people back in the nineteenth century. It’s a prescription I often give myself. To great success, too.

I don’t want to make Bilbao sound landlocked. Here’s a little map for reference:

Close but no cigar, you see. There’s a very specific breeze that only occurs in places where you can threaten to walk into the sea, and when we arrived at the bus station at approximately 1pm and felt the rays of the sun hit the concrete and our quickly-drenched skin, that very specific breeze was palpably absent. You can tell because my forehead vein immmmmediately made an appearance, once we reached the hotel and decided a rooftop drink would not only be apt, but necessary:

If Keri Russell can embrace her deranged forehead veins, then so can I.

So no, Bilbao possesses no opportunity to sunbathe while pondering your own mortality. More’s the pity.

What it does have, though, and I don’t want to understate this, is a significant river that runs across the city. Not only is a river a classic sort of feature (see also: Nile, Amazon, Danube—you get it) that makes one feel at home, but it also, and this is huge for me, bestows a city with a great canvas for bridge-building.

Thus ensued what my friend and I dubbed Bridge Tourism, wherein we made an attempt—in between vermuts and pintxos and cañas and short visits to small bookshops—to cross as many bridges as our weary, dehydrated bodies would permit.

I’m a chronic underpacker btw so if you see me wearing the exact same outfit three days in a row please understand that it is a price I am only too happy to pay to keep my carry-on as light as possible. I hate having too many choices.

How many bridges are there crossing la ría—aka the Nervión-Ibaizabal estuary, aka what I’ve been referring to as the river, forgive me and my pedestrian knowledge of topography—in Bilbao, I can hear you ask, and the answer is 14. I would love to tell you we crossed them all, or even that we counted how many we did cross, but the truth is a tally could not have been further from my mind. I refer you to the aforementioned industrial quantities of sweat wreaking havoc upon my body: I was, as became a habit for most of June and July, fighting for my life.

In a minute I’ll mention this dress and you’ll have to pretend you didn’t already see it here.

For those of us who love to walk and, just as relevantly, to strongarm our friends into walking with us, a river is the perfect body of water. Do you wanna take a stroll down the river is a question that just rolls off the tongue. It’s hard to say no to such an offer. People have been walking down the river for millennia, so should someone suggest the activity, who are you to demur, to remove yourself from this most human of traditions? Silly. Silly. You will take yourself to the river and you will stroll. You will point to bridges in front of and behind you and you will say shall we cross that blueish one up ahead and see if we can find a nice coffee shop on the other side of the river. And you will take a hundred or so steps over the water and you will turn around to where you just were and think huh. Making yourself anew by sheer virtue of crossing a bridge. The easiest transformation you’ll ever make.

***

Of course one of the main reasons why we chose Bilbao was the Guggenheim.

We dedicated a whole morning to it, and there’s actually nothing more satisfying than Leaning In™ to a museum’s allure with your best friend. Did we see this already and do you think they’re together and hold on let me take a picture of you looking at this one and wait where are you I lost you after the tapestry room and lowkey I feel like we’re the hottest people in this exhibit and oh I’ve actually heard of this artist and I’m good whenever you are.

I don’t love shopping with people and I don’t need to watch a film with someone sitting next to me, but I do love company when visiting museums. Even if you don’t navigate it together, there’s something about a museum debrief that makes me feel alive. What Did You Think of the Art is up there with Shall We Take a Stroll Down the River. They’re important questions. They can even be asked in tandem.