Tour through Guggenheim and Casco Viejo (60 minutes)

If you are going to visit our city but do not know what to see in Bilbao in a day, our 60-minute tour will let you get to know, in a quick and fun way, the modern Abandoibarra zone.

The route will begin in our place in Ajuriaguerra Street, where we will give you a training lesson. Once everything is ready, we will depart for the Euskadi Square, where we will see up close the Iberdrola Tower. Apart from the 41-story skyscraper, we will be able to see, in the square designed by landscapist Diana Balmori, other architectural works such as the Ferrater Homes and the Artklass Building—residential buildings with an impressive design—or the Museum of Fine Arts, one of the most important art galleries in the country.

Continuing our route, we will leave the square near the art gallery and we will enter the largest green zone of central Bilbao—the Doña Casilda Park. This beautiful garden park of English style, with more than 100 years of history, is known as the Park of the Ducks, because of its center pond full of web-footed birds, and is a common place for cyclists and skaters.

After crossing the park from end to end, we will enter the precinct of the Euskalduna Palace, a place that is home important conventions and cultural events all year long. On its main front, we will see several works of urban art such as the Metallic Tree Forest—a grove of tree-like lampposts; the Dodecathlos—a metallic sculpture made by Vicente Larrea; or Clemente—a flower elephant. We will go around the building, passing by its beautiful pond, where we will see the Terpsícore sculpture by Salvador Dalí himself, and we will cross under the Euskalduna Bridge to reach the Ría de Bilbao Maritime Museum.

Located on the Ramón de la Sota Dock, the museum has 3,500 square meters for indoors expositions, and 20,000 square meters for outdoors expositions that include a dock full of boats among which the famous Athletic Club Gabarra. In our tour, we will pass by the museum and see the well-known Carola Crane, a crane 60 meters tall that is, along with the Casa de Bombas, the last remnant of the old shipyards.

We will abandon the docks through the ramp that leads to the Euskalduna Bridge, which connects with the Deusto neighborhood, and we will cross to the other side taking advantage of its ample pedestrian space, from which we will be able to see the city’s football field: San Mamés. Once we reach Deusto Bridge, we will traverse the Ribera de Botica Vieja and the Avenida de las Universidades, where we will see all of Abandoibarra from the other side of the Estuary, and we will cross under the Deusto Bridge and the La Salve Bridge, and we will pass by the University of Deusto and the Pedro Arrupe Walkway. Afterwards, we will reach Paseo del Campo Volantín, where we will go around until we reach the Zubizuri Bridge, also called Calatrava Bridge after the famous Valencian architect.

After crossing the walkway, we will enter Uribitarte Walk and we will face Isozaki Atea, a complex comprised of 7 buildings—designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki—out of which, two large towers 82 meters tall stand out. We will traverse all of Uribitarte until we enter the most attractive tourist location in the city: the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao.

Designed by the well-known architect Frank Gehry, the Guggenheim has become the symbol par excellence of Bilbao, and its extravagant structure of steel, crystal, stone—largely covered by enormous titanium plaques—make it a touristic attraction that cannot be missed. We will access the museum through the Campa de los Ingleses dock, where we will take pictures in front of its back pond and with Mamá, a gigantic 9-meter-tall spider—by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. Afterwards, we will move to the front of the building, where we will take pictures with Puppy, a sculpture of a little dog that stands 12 meters tall, covered by thousands of flowers. This kind guardian, which welcomes a million travelers per year at the museum, will be the final goal of our enthralling route through Abandoibarra.