Tour through Abandoibarra and Old Town (90 minutes)

If you are planning a quick travel to see Bilbao in one day, our 90-minute tour will let you see, in a comfortable and entertaining way, on a Segway, both the modern part of Abandoibarra and the Historical Bilbao. There will be almost 10 kilometers in which you will observe many of the most famous buildings and monuments in the Village.

The tour will start from our installations in the Ajuriaguerra Street, from which we will go to the Euskadi Square, our first destination. There, we will be able to see up close the giant Iberdrola Tower, which governs over Bilbao’s skyline thanks to its 165 meters and 41 stories, or the different luxury residential buildings such as the Ferrater Homes and the Artklass Building. Next to the latter, one of the most important art galleries in the country is located—the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum.

We will continue our tour rolling by the crystal façade of the centenarian Museum and entering the city center’s main park—the Doña Casilda Iturrizar Park. This natural jewel of more than 100,000 square feet has more than 800 trees of 71 species and a central pond with ducks, geese and turkey—and thus, the locals call it the Park of the Ducks.

We will go across this green zone using one of its roads—especially designed for going on foot or on bicycle—and we will go out on the other side to enter the area of the Euskalduna Palace. This majestic center for conventions and sociocultural events opened in 1999 as a fundamental part of modern Abandoibarra. In its surroundings, we can enjoy several works of urban art: a group of tree-shaped luminarias that make up the Metallic Tree Forest, an elephant made of flowers called Clemente, or the Trabajos de Hércules sculpture by Vicente Larrea. From the front of the palace, we will go to its rear pond, inside of which the Terpsícore sculpture by the prestigious Dalí is located, and we will go through the Evaristo Churruca Dock to the Guggenheim Museum. In this section, we will go under the Deusto Bridge and by the Pedro Arrupe Walkaway, which connects with the famous University of Deusto faculty.

At the end of the Evaristo Churruca Dock, we will enter the Campa de los Ingleses Dock where the stamp of the city is located—the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao. On the dock’s walkway, we will stop to take some pictures by this crystal, steel and titanium colossus that put Bilbao on the map. We will also see Mamá up close—the famous 9-meter tall spider by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois.

Leaving behind the Campa de los Ingleses, we will go under the La Salve Bridge and we will enter Uribitarte Walk until we arrive at the Isozaki Towers. These two skyscrapers, almost as tall as the BBVA Tower, were designed by the Japanese architect Arata Isozaki inside the Isozaki Atea complex of buildings. In front of them, we will find the well-known Zubizuri Bridge or Calatrava Bridge, designed by the Valencian engineer Santiago Calatrava.

Crossing the ZubiZuri, we will end up on the other side of the Estuary, where we will traverse the Paseo Volantín until we reach the installations of the Bilbao City Hall. We will leave behind the eclectic Town Hall, which governs the city since 1892, to go across the Del Arenal Park and enter the Old Quarter, the oldest neighborhood in the city.

Once we reach the old quarter, we will move to the Unamuno Square and enter the New Square or Barria Square, a neoclassical-styled place built in the XIX century that is home, every Sunday, to its popular street market. We will leave the square through one of its porticos and we will roll through the narrow streets of the quarter until we reach the Bilbao Cathedral, an architectonic jewel in which its original gothic style meets the neogothic one of its latest refurbishments.

From the monument square, we will take the Bidebarrieta Street on our way to the Arriaga Theater, an elegant neo-baroque building in which the residents of Bilbao enjoy important theater plays, dances, opera or zarzuela. After crossing its front square, we will enter the Paseo del Arenal again and we will start our way back traversing all of the riverbank of the estuary all the way up to the City Hall. Once we get there, we will cross the City Hall Bridge and go down through the Uribitarte Walk, which we will traverse from end to end until we reach the Guggenheim Museum.

The museum will be our last stop because, before going back to our headquarters, we will stop before the giant flower statue designed by Jeff Koons for the visitors of the Guggenheim—the enormous little dog Puppy.