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Bilbao: the Guggenheim effect
UNESCO Courier, Sept, 1998 by Lucia Iglesias
How are the Bilbainos, whose city once only received a brief write-up in the tourist guides, reacting to this newly acquired reputation? At first they were sceptical about the whole thing, remembers journalist Felix Linares. Then they gradually realized that it was serious and today they are delighted. "A familiar sight elsewhere, such as a Japanese tourist taking photos, was something quite new here!" says Linares, who notes that it's still virtually impossible to find a restaurant open on a Sunday evening.
Angel Gago, Secretary-General of the Biscay Hotels Association, thinks that there has definitely been a boost to tourism. "Until not so long ago the province mainly attracted business people," he says. "They came during the week for trade exhibitions. From Monday to Friday there was a decent rate of room occupation, but on Saturday and Sunday the place was deserted" - especially since many locals leave the city during weekends for nearby beaches. Today the annual rate of hotel-room occupation is around 42 per cent. "We are worried by talk of building four or five new hotels which could not be absorbed in the immediate future, and increased capacity would force us to lower prices, something we want to avoid," says Gago. The tourists who visit Bilbao today are relatively well off, and Gage points out that "the hotels and restaurants which have benefited most are the fifteen or twenty featured in the tourist guides, whereas all told the city has 8,000 catering establishments."
Gago believes that anyone who drops in on Bilbao today is a candidate for a return visit. "Don't forget," he says. "We have the Gehry Museum, Foster's metro, Santiago Calatrava's bridge, the area around the Palace of Congresses designed by Cesar Pelli, an Argentinian architect living in New York, in other words works by five or six world-famous architects within a few kilometres of each other."
In her book Txoriburu ("Linnet Head") the Bilbao writer and illustrator Asun Balzola describes her city as it was in the 1940s. "These were years of iron and we lived at Bilbao, also a city of iron, always wet, gleaming and black because it was always raining. . . . The green shadows of umbrellas stained the streets and houses blackened by smoke from the factories. . . . Bilbao was a replica of Coke-town, the imaginary industrial town described by Dickens in Hard Times." Today Balzola smiles as she describes her city's new image. "The district where I spent my childhood has changed beyond belief. Then it was a noisy industrial area, today it's a very peaceful place. Bilbao was a grey city like . . . well . . . Manchester perhaps. Now it's white, luminous." What surprises her most is that "people have adopted the Guggenheim Museum, they don't see it as the property of gentlemen in New York but as something of their own. The most encouraging thing is that young people are the chief admirers." And she adds: "When you're inside the building, the light, and the spirals of the architecture almost make you forget its contents. You would almost be willing to visit it if it was empty. The Guggenheim has made Bilbao a much more attractive city. You can see it from many parts of town. You walk along a street and suddenly there is this great titanium-clad mountain in front of you. It plays tricks on you."
