The dour city of Bilbao, located on the Basque coast of Northeastern Spain on the Bay of Biscay, has not exactly been an attraction for tourists to the peninsula over the years—nothing, that is, compared to the varied allure represented by Seville and Granada, or even Madrid and Barcelona. Something still remains of Bilbao’s rustbelt past; it is a city of some 400,000, renowned throughout Spain as a center for banking, steel mills, shipping, and shipyards. As a cultural force, it has always represented a liberal mercantile counterpoise to the rural, conservative tendencies of the Basque people.

The city survived three horrendous sieges by the reactionary Carlist forces in the nineteenth century, and it was almost razed to the ground by General Francisco Franco, who viewed the short-lived Basque autonomous government in Bilbao (permitted by the republic) as a mortal threat to his future domination of the nation, as it surely was. In The Basque History of the World,[1] Mark Kurlansky’s overview of the Basque people, the city was spared this time, because Franco’s German advisors instead decided to pounce on the spiritual home of the Basque people, a town called Guernica, with a notorious massacre later made palpable to all by the hand of Pablo Picasso.

Bilbao is indirectly involved in a topic taken up by Kurlansky late in his book—the whys and wherefores of the construction of the new Guggenheim Museum designed by Frank Gehry. In this disenchanted scrutiny of the matter, Kurlansky