Getxo

The first thing to note about visiting Bilbao on a cruise ship is that the terminal is located in Getxo, around fifteen kilometres to the north of the heart of the city. The cruise port provides free shuttles into Getxo from where it’s fairly easy to use public transport into Bilbao (the metro system seemingly the most convenient) and it’s likely that Princess were running a service into the city from the port although I don’t know this for certain and don’t know the pricing as it’s not something we needed to worry about. Getxo looked like a pretty nice place from what we saw as we drove through it; it’s probably worth a look around on its own if you’re visiting this particular port on more than one occasion if only for the Vizcaya Bridge that we saw in operation from the coach windows as we made our way along the bank of the Nervión river to our destination.

Bilbao

The coach drop-off point for our walking tour of Bilbao was beside El Arenal park, a short distance from the Catholic church of Saint Nicolás, an 18th-century building in Baroque style built to honour the patron saint of sailors and apparently a meeting point for sailors before they would set off to sea. Sadly, we wouldn’t be entering any buildings during this walking tour because of the relatively short amount of time in the city so we never got to see its octagonal-shaped interior.

El Arenal park has a number of public toilets and this produced the first irritation in a number that would diminish the enjoyment of this particular cruise excursion. It really hadn’t been that long since we’d got off the Sapphire Princess (a little over half an hour maybe) but around a quarter of our coach apparently needed to go to the loo. Now, I know that some people may have bladder problems so this in itself wouldn’t be that big a deal except we weren’t the only coach that had parked up and the number of people from the various vehicles far exceeded the number of cubicles. Again, just one of those things that happens with scheduling so it shouldn’t be that annoying except two women in our group managed to be last in the queue or fell asleep in the toilets or had a really long chat or something. Whatever it was meant that the rest of us stood around for over twenty minutes before they casually wandered back to us and we could set off. On what was a fairly short excursion anyway this was a large amount of time to lose and, in fact, it meant that at the conclusion of our walking tour of Bilbao we were only left with about fifteen minutes of free time; not enough to really do anything.

Our visit to the Basque city coincided with Heineken promoting rugby and a festival due to take place in the park. We wouldn’t be around for any of that, though.

We were then led into the narrow streets of the old town of Bilbao by our very knowledgeable guide. While generally of the same style of architecture the various, often colourful facades of the tall buildings in this part of the city lent everything a nicely eclectic look and there were some lovely little stonework touches on some of the buildings, some of them no doubt very old indeed. The weather, unfortunately, wasn’t the best it could be from a photographic perspective; a uniform blanket of white cloud over a confined, dark area of streets does not make for the most attractive of pictures. Still, these old town layouts always have that sense of casual evolution over their curving, wandering routes rather than something designed which gives them a lovely feel when you’re strolling through them.

You might notice that a lot of the photos I took as we walked through Bilbao are quite elevated. Generally, I like to grab photos with people in them as they add life and scale to the pictures but the tendency towards angled-up shots boils down to the second irritation, that being one of the order in which the two aspects of the excursion took place. As I’ve said already, there were two parts to this trip: the museum visit and the walking tour. It would have been far better for the museum to have been the first stop rather than the order in which it was done for a very simple but quite important reason if you’re thinking of coming to the city: trucks and vans are permitted in the narrow town streets up until 11:00 in the morning in order to load and unload goods for the shops. What this amounted to for us was rather than a pleasant stroll through a pedestrianised section of the historical part of Bilbao learning its history we were instead often pressed up against buildings as vans rumbled past, occasionally struggled to hear anything over idling engines or the sound of tailgates lowering crates, and generally presented with little sight of the allegedly interesting buildings due to trucks parked in front of them. Just as our walking tour came to an end so all the vehicles disappeared from the streets; had we visited this after the museum it would have been far more enjoyable. Due to the relatively short distance between the Guggenheim and the old town there really didn’t seem to be much of a logistical reason why this tour sequence couldn’t have been swapped around and that was the feedback I provided to Princess.

Built in the 14th century and originally just a church, Santiago Cathedral proved an interesting stop for us as the final port on our cruise would be Santiago de Compostela, both places being named for Saint James as part of the pilgrimage route across the north of Spain.

The final gathering point – thankfully vehicle-free – was Plaza Nueva, a large and attractive square built in the 19th century and surrounded by arched, covered walkways housing plenty of shops and restaurants. One of the main buildings was the seat of the regional government until a new location was built specifically for the purpose and the square now often hosts tournaments or festivals.

With a look at her watch our tour guide then told us we had a quarter of an hour to explore on our own before meeting back at the coach. This just wasn’t anywhere near enough time to do anything of note so we headed immediately out of the old town area and down past the theatre to the river’s edge to grab a few photos of something rather lovely-looking we’d spotted on our way in: the Santander-Bilbao Concordia train station. Specifically, what had grabbed my eye was the gorgeous art nouveau design by Severino Achúcarro dating to the turn of the 20th century. Some of Achúcarro’s design work had also made it onto the facade of the cathedral so this rounded off our short exploration of Bilbao quite nicely.

Photos taken we made our way back to the coach and then sat around for a further ten minutes after our due departure time waiting for two women to stroll back late without so much as an apology for eating into what would be our museum-visiting time. Would it surprise you to know that it was the same two women who we’d had to wait twenty minutes for at the start of the walking tour? No, no it probably wouldn’t.

The walking tour of Bilbao could definitely have been better arranged and we had some bad luck in having two somewhat selfish fellow tourists along with us. The streets of the old town felt like there was more there to discover with a bit more time and we’d love to go back at some point to do just that but we were, in the end, a bit disappointed with this portion of this cruise excursion.

From a distance the most obvious sight of new development is the Iberdrolar Tower (architect: César Pelli) but the place we’d come to see – indeed, probably, most tourists come to see – was the Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim Museum. It really was designed that way and isn’t the result of a too-proud architect refusing to acknowledge he shouldn’t have built his prototype model from chocolate and left it on the parcel shelf in the back of his car on a sunny day.

Our tour group was met by a second guide and split into two outside the entrance to make it easier to take us through the museum. The actual process of getting into the museum was very easy and although we’d been warned about not taking in large bags the checking of these did not look too stringent to me; indeed, the space in the museum is so vast it’s arguable that any large bags would really get in the way at all but you should be prepared to surrender them just to be on the safe side, especially if the museum is very busy or if you want to chance your arm and wheel a suitcase in. Single adult tickets bought online at time of writing this are €16. We gathered in the inner atrium (after another long wait for people to use the toilet, naturally), a space Gehry nicknamed “The Flower” due to its shape and the only interior location of the museum that permits photography.

The angles and sweeping curves of the interior reflected a lot of the design of the exterior of the Guggenheim Museum though with understandably different materials in play. The prominence of white and huge windows in the atrium that looked down to the river and allowed in light also brought in some of that external material – the titanium sheets – allowing us to touch them. The titanium was chosen so that it would change appearance as it aged – “Yo, Gehry, what’s with the weird colouring?” “Er, yeah, no, er, I meant that” – and the overall shape of the building was generally just random although many critics see waves and ships or fishes or melted chocolate in the back of cars in the design.

A criticism of this point in the cruise excursion, though, is that we spent an awful lot of time in the atrium hearing the history of the area and the building, the materials, the design choices, the critics’ views, etc. While a lovely place and a very informative talk from a very knowledgeable guide the things we’d really come to see were the exhibits. Revisiting my argument from the walking tour of Bilbao portion of this organised trip, had the two elements been reversed in the order in which they were undertaken we could have heard this history on the coach on the approach to the Guggenheim Museum giving us extra time to see what it was housing.

Stepping through a doorway off the atrium opposite the entrance we emerged out onto a concrete balcony in the outside air where we could get up close to Tulips by Jeff Koons. From the official website description:

Tulips, a bouquet of multicolor balloon flowers blown up to gargantuan proportions (more than 2 meters tall and 5 meters across), belongs to the ambitious Celebration series, initiated by Koons in 1994. […] With its immaculate, reflective stainless-steel surfaces, Tulips recalls earlier works by the artist such as Rabbit (1986), which similarly transformed a banal inflatable object into something hard, gleaming, and iconic. In Tulips and in the balloon animals that populate the Celebration series, as in his towering Puppy (1992), Koons has manipulated scale, as well as materials, to uncanny ends. While Tulips might evoke the large industrial forms of certain Minimalist sculptures, the buoyant, colorful sculpture equally brings to mind a jaunty parade float.

One of Koons’s other creations, Puppy, referenced in the quote above was present near the entrance to the Guggenheim but was covered in scaffolding for repairs and subsequently not photographed.

Back inside we next went into the largest space on the ground floor, the Arcelor Gallery (formerly the Fish Gallery), housing the permanent exhibition piece The Matter of Time by the sculptor Richard Serra. This was a strangely compelling, fun, if arguably disturbing place and I wish we’d had more time (ironically) here. The cavernous space is host to several, weathered steel constructions arranged in spirals or waving lines or numerous other configurations that you can wander through. Our guide took us through one which simply spiralled in on itself but the distance between the walls of the spiralled steel varied and the inward- or outward-leaning angles of the walls of the free-standing structure varied too as you moved into the sculpture’s interior; the effect was disconcerting with feelings that perhaps you were walking at an angle or that the space was confining or expanding and, overall, a loss of sense of just how far or even how long you’d walked before reaching the central space. It’s not just a must-see exhibit, it’s a must-experience one.

The following photo comes from The Matter of Time works page on the Guggenheim’s website just to show you the sculptures from above.

After an all-too-brief visit to the permanent exhibition we were taken through the other rooms of the Guggenheim Museum to see what they were showcasing. One Hundred and Fifty Multicolored Marilyns by Andy Warhol was a very obvious eye-catching piece but there were some works by Jean-Michel Basquiat I quite liked too. Museum employees were kept busy stepping up to remind people not to take photographs (it’s funny how often museum and gallery visitors seem to forget rules) but you can see many of the works at the museum’s site here: Works in the Collection.

With the rooms quickly gone through we were then given some free time before we’d need to meet back at the coach for the return to the cruise ship. We decided that rather than see some of the artwork in more detail we would head outside as the time left didn’t really leave a lot to meaningfully look at anything and we fancied some photographs of the building from a number of angles as it is such an attractive design. It was at this point that we overhead a group of Americans in our tour group grumbling that they hadn’t seen “any real art” and that they didn’t realise it was going to be full of “that modern rubbish.” People, eh? It’s always advisable to do a little bit of research before booking an excursion.

There were two prominent sculpture pieces outside the Guggenheim Museum. The first of these was Anish Kapoor‘s Tall Tree & The Eye consisting of 73 highly-reflective, stainless steel balls. This proved to be popular with people posing in front of it and I happily grabbed someone doing just that.

The second work was the almost 9-metre high, disturbing, spider creation, Maman by Louise Bourgeois. The name of the piece comes from its creation as a tribute to the sculptor’s mother who was herself a weaver. It’s a beautifully eerie work and my only regret is that the weather wasn’t ideal for capturing nice pictures of it.

But, of course, the majority of photos taken were of the Guggenheim Museum itself. Under clear skies and sunshine I imagine the change in colour tones as the light reflects off the undulating titanium exterior would be absolutely enchanting and I’d love to return for an early evening in summer at some point just to see how the tone would warm. A fabulous bit of architecture that barely looked like melted chocolate at all now I think about it.

We would have preferred a lot more time at the Guggenheim in retrospect so I’m not sure that this particular excursion is one that I can recommend if you’re keen on architecture and art. If we were to return to Bilbao at some point then we’d consider simply coming to the museum and spending a lot more time on just it rather than try to cram too much into a short trip as we unfortunately did this time around. That’s the gamble, though, and we always look at these excursions – and, indeed, cruises in general – as taster trips to whet our appetites for a return visit.