Bilbao, Spain

This past 2 weeks I was on a hiking trip through the Basque Country in Spain! It was a very different kind of trip for me. We essentially arrived in Bilbao, Spain, then took a train out to the countryside. From there we hiked our way back over the course of a week, stopping in B+Bs along the way. It was wild! My feet hurt a lot!

So like I said we started in Bilbao, the largest city in the Basque Country. It’s a gorgeous place, it actually reminds me a lot of Italy with the similar architecture and pedestrian streets. Many of the churches are in the gothic style, and there’s plenty of beautiful public parks and fountains that add to this. One interesting difference though is that Bilbao is on the side of a mountain, so there’s at least 3 different levels of streets that I could see. The whole city is stacked on top of each other! It makes for interesting views, and I imagine driving around is an interesting time if you end up on the wrong level.

We really only had time to see the Guggenheim museum within Bilbao itself, and it has an awesome collection. Before you even enter the museum, you can see the very shiny architecture and a couple statues outside of the building. The most popular is Puppy, a giant statue of a puppy covered in flowers. It’s regularly maintained and the flowers change, so the colors change over the years and seasons as well!

Once inside there’s a good number of larger art pieces on the ground floor, while the upper floors have changing exhibits and a permanent collection. I thought the selection was very cool, there was an exhibit on 1920s art, looking at how artists moved on from the trauma of the first World War. Very relevant.

After that, it was mostly a lot of hiking. The mountains were incredible, and we had a good number of ridge walks. Parts of the hike were difficult, but the views made it worth it. It definitely wasn’t my favorite way to travel, but I am glad that I did it. It made for a nice change to be out in nature walking around. We saw a lot of cows, as well as horses and sheep.

I do wish that we spent more time in the city, but it was an interesting way to experience northern Spain. I got to see more nature and rural towns rather than just the big city. It was exhausting and my feet still hurt, but the pictures that I have made it worthwhile!