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...

 

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