There’s very little evidence of Bilbao’s industrial past in the city centre now. The riverside has all been cleaned up and the old wharves turned into riverside promenades. Abandoibarra, where the big shipyard was, has been a massive regeneration project, of which the Guggenheim is just a part. And there is nothing left of the ironworks on the hills surrounding the city centre, except for one rather impressive chimney which has been left in place as a reminder.

Another reminder, just down river from the Guggenheim and still on the site of the old shipyard, is the Euskalduna Palace, the new concert hall and congress centre built a few years ago. (‘Euskalduna’ means ‘Euskara-speaking’ and is the Euskara word for a Basque person as well as a Basque speaker.) Along the riverside by the concert hall are some sculptures based on wharf cranes, and the concert hall itself is an extraordinary ship-like structure made of rusting ship steel. It’s not a beautiful building but it’s a remarkable one.

Rusting ship steel is also used in the main permanent exhibit inside the Guggenheim, Richard Serra´s sculpture series, ‘The Matter of Time’, again intended as a reminder of the place’s shipping history.

Next to the Euskalduna Palace, there is a excellent maritime museum with some industrial remnants in its yard.

Down the estuary, in the six miles of river between the centre of town and the sea, there´s plenty to see of the industrial past and present – much of it derelict, some still working. A boat goes down this way every day in the summer and it’s a great trip. The derelict yards are eerie wasteland, and the few working yards have some quite exciting machinery – cranes on railway tracks with giant claws for picking up cargo – which it’s fun to watch.

Eventually you get to the sea, with the town of Portugalete on one side and the town of Getxo on the other, connected by the Vizcaya Bridge, the great transporter bridge built in 1893 which is one of Bilbao´s glories, and a UN World Heritage Site. 

This is what it says the UN website:

Vizcaya Bridge straddles the mouth of the Ibaizabal estuary, west of Bilbao. It was designed by the Basque architect Alberto de Palacio and completed in 1893. The 45-m-high bridge with its span of 160 m, merges 19th-century ironworking traditions with the then new lightweight technology of twisted steel ropes. It was the first bridge in the world to carry people and traffic on a high suspended gondola and was used as a model for many similar bridges in Europe, Africa and the America only a few of which survive. With its innovative use of lightweight twisted steel cables, it is regarded as one of the outstanding architectural iron constructions of the Industrial Revolution.

The Vizcaya Bridge can be seen as a culmination of iron working practices in the Basque area. The local iron seams were mined in Roman times; from 13th -16th century iron was exported to France and the Low Countries from as many as 300 Basque ironworks. And by the 18th century Basque iron was being used as agricultural implements for colonising new lands in South America. At the end of the 19th century, the ironworks were at the peak of their output with the adoption of new production methods disseminated by the industrial revolution. A dense array of iron and steel works and shipbuilding were developed around the mouth of the River Ibaizabal and Bilbao was the most important industrial, mining, commercial shipping and financial centre in Spain. Around 12 million tons of goods, mainly iron ore and iron products, were exported each year along the three miles of the River Ibaizabal to the port on the Bay of Biscay. Industry developed all along the river on its west bank towards the estuary.

Towards the end of the 19th century, as the population increased, the right bank of the estuary was colonised for housing. This brought the need for transport across the mouth of the river for people moving from where they lived to where they worked and to link the railways on both banks. This link could not interrupt the dense shipping traffic in the river.

Many solutions were considered; it was architect, Alberto de Palacio who developed the idea of a cable reinforced transporter bridge, making use of the lightweight twisted steel rope cables newly invented by Ferdinand Arnodin. This allowed a bridge to be built on flat land without the need for ramps and created a structure that did not have to be raised and lowered to allow the passage of ships.

The iconic nature of the bridge was recognised at the time. De Palacio said that it should endow the estuary with a ‘elegant and grandiose aspect' and be proof of the ‘extraordinary wealthy Bibao mining area'.

 The bridge was opened on 16 June 1893. It has operated continuously since apart from during the Spanish Civil War.

The impressive gondola still carries people and cars across on cables. You can also – should you be mad enough to want to do so – walk across the top of the bridge, 45 metres above the river. Pietro did this, and said that even he found it a bit scary. I went across on the gondola….

Here are some of the pictures Pietro took from the top:

And below are some pictures of the bridge. (It was a particularly beautiful day - Dec 24th and 21 degrees! I was quite pleased with the shots of the cables glinting in the late afternoon sun.)

The town of Portugalete on one side of the bridge is a medieval fishing town as old as Bilbao which later became an industrial and shipping centre. There´s a medieval church on the hill, a lovely square by the river full of plane trees (a common sight throughout the Basque country), and a nice hotel with a terrace where people come to eat and drink on sunny days.

On the other side of the river is the wealthy suburb of Getxo, with its beaches, its marina, its English-style mansions (see previous post), and the little medieval fishing village of Algorta at its heart.

And further on is Santurtzi, where the still thriving modern port of Bilbao begins. I haven´t been as far as the port (which is where one would arrive if one took the ship from Portsmouth to Bilbao). But we did get to the old harbour at Santurtzi

By the harbour, there is a moving memorial to the 4000 Basque children ('Los Ninos de la Guerra') who were shipped from here to Britain in 1937 at the time of the Spanish Civil War to get them away from the bombs. Many never came back, and those who did often found that their families had died in the bombings. The massacre at Guernica, just a few miles from Bilbao, is well-known, but the whole of the Basque Country was a major focus of the war, with Franco keen to subjugate the troublesome Basques. Guernica took place on April 26th 1937. The Basque Children were shipped off on May 21st. The Battle of Bilbao (which Franco won) took place on 11th June 1937, during which all the city’s bridges (but not the transporter bridge at Portugalete) were destroyed.

The memorial is positioned around the base of an old crane on the wharf:

The mosaic shows images of the bombing of Guernica by German planes, and parents and children hugging as the children set sail for Britain:

You can read more about the Basque children and what happened to them in Britain by following the links below. There was recently a BBC TV documentary about them, and a new animated film about them will be released shortly.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/posts/Wales-and-the-refugee-children-of-the-Basque-country

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-19439627

http://www.basquechildren.org/

Rare Bilbao snowfall yesterday - and what a difference half an hour makes...

Yesterday at the Guggenheim at 11 am:

And at 11.30 am:

11 am:

11.30 am:

11 am:

11.30 am:

After I’ve built up everyone’s views of Bilbao with all the nice photos and descriptions, you might be disappointed if I say that Bilbao reminds me in lots of ways of Nottingham (where I spent the first 20 years of my life.)

First of all, for those of you who haven’t been there, Nottingham is not at all a bad place – a lot better than its reputation might suggest. It’s a handsome Victorian city (though like most British cities it’s been disfigured in places and has its share of dreary suburbs and woeful modern estates). Although what’s left is mainly Georgian and later, Nottingham is also a very historic city of Anglo-Saxon foundation, and it has been an important provincial centre since the Norman invasion.  It has an imposing market square – the biggest in the country (about the same size as Trafalgar Square in London and St Peter’s Square in Rome!), a wonderfully preserved Anglo-Saxon and Norman street plan, some superb Georgian and Victorian architecture and city planning, a great medieval church (St Mary’s), a historic castle built on a spectacular sandstone outcrop, a huge network of sandstone caves under the city, one of the best Jacobean buildings in Britain (Wollaton Hall), a fascinating industrial history, a thriving cultural life, and a successful current programme of regeneration.

So maybe you can see why the comparison with Bilbao is apt. Like Nottingham, it’s a medieval city almost entirely rebuilt in the nineteenth century when it became a major industrial centre. Like Nottingham it’s a handsome city, (though far from beautiful in places) with a thriving cultural life and successful regeneration. It’s also about the same size as Nottingham (a surprisingly small population of around 350,000 in the city itself, whilst the total population for the broader metropolitan is around 800,000). Like Nottingham, it’s a major northern provincial centre. (OK, I know Nottingham isn’t exactly the north…. But it’s only about 10 miles south of the north! And in any case one of the definitions of ‘the North’ is anywhere north of the Trent. Which Nottingham is. And I consider myself a northerner. So there.)

And with all this, Bilbao feels very much like Nottingham – provincial, modern, business-focused, multi-cultural, very much a working city, part of the industrial north rather than the more genteel and conservative heartlands further south - and a place that actually feels smaller than it is, with its compact historic city centre and its sprawling industrial suburbs

Bilbao...

Nottingham....

Of course there are also ways that it’s very different from Nottingham: the river running spectacularly through the centre, for instance, and the proximity to the sea. And much of what I’ve identified as similar between Bilbao and Nottingham could just as well be applied to Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool, Glasgow. In fact Bilbao’s very marked cultural and linguistic identity, as well its maritime nature, might be better compared with Glasgow or even Liverpool.

From the moment I arrived in the Basque Country, I was struck by the similarities between the valleys of the Basque hills, with its chimneys, factories, mines and mills, and the  valleys of South Yorkshire - a strange and sometimes ugly mixture of the rural and the industrial. In fact, there’s a very strong network of connections between Bilbao, Barcelona and the industrial North of England. Bilbao and Barcelona were/are the two major industrial cities of Spain, both in the North; the Industrial Revolution in Spain never reached further than these two cities. Both Bilbao and Barcelona forged strong links with engineers and industrialists from England, and there was a considerable traffic in both directions – with Spanish engineers and industrialists going to England to study engineering and the methods of British industry, and British miners and shipbuilders coming to Bilbao and Barcelona looking for employment.

As I wrote in a previous post, it was this English influence which was responsible at that time for introducing football to Spain, hence the English names of football clubs such as ‘Bilbao Athletic’, and, in Bilbao, the riverside area near the old shipyards known as ‘La Campa de Ingleses’ (The English Field) where the English workers would play football. ('Muelle' means 'wharf').

But the influences went further than football. Perhaps the most notable example of English influence in Bilbao is the extraordinary turn-of-the-century industrialists’ mansions in the wealthy suburb of Getxo, overlooking the port of Bilbao, built in ‘l’estilo Ingles’ (the English style), in imitation of the late Victorian and Edwardian suburban housing of British industrialists (cf some of the houses in The Park and Mapperley Park in Nottingham). Almost all of them were built by an architect called Manuel Maria Smith (who had a British grandparent).

(Similar houses were built by industrialists in various places along the north coast of Spain and in Catalunya. The houses are often known as ‘Indianos’, as they were often built by families who had made a fortune in South America in the nineteenth century.)

So there we have it.

These connections between the Spanish and English Industrial Revolution were reinforced by a superb exhibition we saw a few months ago in Barcelona (at the Museum of the History of Barcelona in the old royal palace (Palau Reial). It was called Indianes: the Origins of Industrial Barcelona. Maybe it sounds quite dry, but in fact it was fascinating, and one of the most beautifully presented exhibitions I’ve seen. (NB: the word in the title is ‘Indianes’, which means ‘Calicoes’, rather than ‘Indianos’, mentioned above, which is a totally different and unrelated idea).

The text of the exhibition included the following:

The wars in which Spain became involved between 1797 and 1814 led Barcelona's manufacture of calicoes to a state of crisis. The loss of their foreign markets obliged the cotton industrialists to carry out a restructuring of their production and trade. Confined to the Spanish market, they committed themselves to technical change in order to reduce costs and to gain in competitiveness. English Spinning Jennies, which were revolutionising the cotton industry in Europe, were first brought to Barcelona between 1785 and 1805. This marked the beginning of the mechanisation process which, following the Peninsular War, continued with the adoption of the roller printing machine and the power loom.

And where did Spinning Jennies come from? … Why, Nottingham of course!

The rain it continueth to rain every day. The river is running fast and high. It has barely stopped raining since Christmas. There are flood warnings all round the Basque Country. Water levels are ten times higher than they were this time last year. And the Eastern bits near the Pyrenees have had some of the biggest snowfalls on record. (No snow in Bilbao, mind – we haven’t even had a frost yet.)

As I said, Bilbao is a city of umbrellas. So much so that pretty much every bar in the city (and there are many hundreds) has hooks underneath the bar on which you can hang your umbrella. Neat, eh? And they’re getting a lot of use at the moment…

Still, the Magnolias are out already and it feels like Spring might be about to be in the air.

Earlier this week, it was ‘el dia di San Blas’ – Saint Blaise Day. This is marked with a special biscuit:

And then it was ‘el dia di Santa Agueda’ – Saint Agatha’s Day. Although not a major fiesta, this was one of the most charming things we’ve seen here. The main event is the ‘vispera (vespers) di Santa Agueda’. In the evening, local choirs – from Bilbao and the towns and villages around – walk around the Casco Viejo and sing the hymn of Santa Agueda, which is a rather beautiful song, basically saying that the purpose of the song is to bring warmth and happiness to people in their houses at this cold time of year:


¡Felicidad a todos los de esta casa!
venimos llamando,
de puerta en puerta como una vieja costumbre
con intención de renovarla este año.
No somos muy ricos en dinero,
ni en zapatos.
Pero andamos con la garganta sana,
y tenemos ganas de cantar.

Estamos en víspera de Santa Águeda
día de Euskal Herria,
El día que hemos elegido
para llenar las casa de alegría cantando.
Querida Santa hoy hemos cogido
a nuestro amigo del camino.
Con su ayuda podemos llenar
de esperanza este día.

Most of them ended up singing outside our flat. Some of them were really lovely – rather like the Welsh choirs in feel. The custom on this day is that the choirs wear Basque country dress and bang sticks on the ground in rhythm as they’re singing

It was raining, of course, but that didn't stop anyone.

Here's a YouTube film of a typical group singing the hymn:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5j4ZZ4gJHwo

In the morning, a group of children from a local primary school sang outside our flat. This was fascinating because it was an extraordinarily multicultural group, presumably from the area round the corner from the Casco Viejo where many immigrants live. There was hardly a Basque face amongst them – mostly South Americans and West Africans – but they were all singing the hymn of Santa Agueda in Euskera and wearing smocks and berets.

Indeed, the Basques are proud that they have taught their language and customs to so many immigrants through the school system, seeing this as part of the strategy of national revival for Euskera – something I’ll try and write about more later.

And it's not just choirs that do it. Here are the firemen ('bomberos') of Bilbao singing the Santa Agueda hymn:
http://www.eitb.com/es/videos/detalle/1246744/video-santa-agueda--los-bomberos-bilbao-cantan-santa-agueda/

Choral singing in the streets doesn’t just happen on this day, though. There’s a lot of it here.  An organisation called Bilbo Kantari organises regular communal singing of traditional Basque songs. The events happen on the street outside our flat every couple of weeks. We also came across the same phenomenon in San Sebastian. They distribute songbooks with the words in Euskera so that everyone can join in, and they’re very popular: all part of the hugely popular revival of Basque language and folklore.

After the relatively subtle celebrations of San Blas and Santa Agueda, the week rounded off with CARNIVAL! After all, it’s at least – oh, let’s see – a couple of weeks since the population of Bilbao had an excuse to party in the streets en masse….

This was the view from our balcony last night as the Bilbainos came out in force to dance and sing and drink.

The usual fiesta type thing – only this time with FANCY DRESS! It was fancy dress central  - ‘El Disfraz’ in Spanish.

The fancy dress shops do most of their year’s business this week. For at least a fortnight you couldn’t even walk past the fancy dress shops because of the queues blocking the streets. I’m afraid my photos don’t really do justice to the extraordinary variety of beautifully disported costumes, but here are a few shots.

And the Latin American immigrants were noticeably out in force, showing everyone how Carnival is really done.

So there we are, another week, another fiesta here in Bilbao.

Hasta luego, chicos y chicas!

We haven’t done that much travelling while we’ve been here yet: for various reasons, there just hasn’t been time. And we have now officially scaled down any ambitions we might have had to travel all over Spain! In fact, we’ve pretty much given up on any idea of travelling much beyond the Basque Country – there just isn’t going to be time.

Even in the Basque Country we haven’t gone very far. Apart from occasional train journeys across it to get to France, we have only really explored our local region, Bizkaia (Biscay), of which Bilbao (Bilbo in Basque) is the centre. Until recently, we hadn’t been to the other two regions – Gipuzkoa, next to France, of which San Sebastian is the centre; and Alava, south of the mountains, of which Vitoria (Gasteiz in Basque) is the centre.

Mid-January may not seem a promising time to visit one of the most beautiful seaside resorts in Spain, but we wanted to experience the San Sebastian ‘Tamborrada’, the fiesta on the ‘Dia de San Sebastian’, perhaps the biggest event of the year there, and one of the most popular in Spain. We’re very glad we went: it was yet another quite extraordinary event. The weather was absolutely atrocious, but in a way that made it all the more extraordinary.

The name ‘Tamborrada’ sounds as if it might have something to do with percussion instruments – and indeed it does. Around 10,500 of them, in fact. Playing non-stop for 24 hours.

We knew that it would be noisy, and we knew that, staying in a little pension in the centre of the old town, we might not get much sleep because of the drumming. But we really weren’t prepared for the scale of the whole thing, nor for the fact that it all went ahead despite the truly awful weather.

What happens is that, at the stroke of midnight on Saturday night, drumming bands of around 50 people (each one accompanied by a brass band of six or seven players) start marching about the town drumming, and they keep drumming for 24 hours – all night and all day – finishing at midnight on Sunday night. 

Altogether there are 195 bands (!) of around 50 people each, involved in this: according to the official programme, a total of 10,500 people (all local folk) drumming!  And all 10,500 of them are dressed either as Napoleonic soldiers or as chefs…. Half the drummers are dressed as soldiers, and the other half as chefs. The ‘soldiers’ (known as ‘tamborreros’) have traditional drums and the ‘chefs’ have barrel drums.

They don’t all drum at the same time. There is a huge schedule that says when each band will play, and gives their marching routes. Each band takes a 3-hour shift, so that any one time there will probably be around 25 bands playing around the city. Even if it is raining very hard with high-speed winds all night. Which it was.

Meanwhile, the population of the town goes mad. Having started early on Saturday evening, they drink in the streets all Saturday night and probably much of the next day too. And they continue to drink in the streets – you guessed it – even if it is raining very hard with high speed winds all night. Which it was.

The brass players ( - there seems to be an amazing number of superb brass players in the Basque country -) play a series of traditional march tunes, over and over again for the whole 24 hours, whilst the drummers just keep drumming along.

As the bands march around town, they are followed by hundreds of people who sing – and often bang – along. Little children (and some adults) come along with mini-drums and bang along. And every now and again the bands stop and are plied with wine by the locals in that street.

There is also a ‘tamborrada infantil’ in which hundreds of children take part.

The most popular marches are the ‘Marcha de San Sebastian’ and the ‘Diana’ march. We heard these many, many times. You can hear them here, drumming and all:

http://e-donostia.blogspot.com.es/2010/01/la-tamborrada-de-san-sebastian-al.html

Given the weather - heavy and continuous rain with very high winds - we were a little reluctant to go out for the midnight opening ceremony and thought it might be a bit of a wash-out anyway. How wrong we were!  Thousands of people – and umbrellas – were crammed into the Plaza Nueva, and the rain was not going to deter them one little bit.  The atmosphere was extraordinary. Thousands of other people were sitting in ‘tabernas’ around the city watching it all on tv, or listening to bands in other parts of the city.

Here are a couple of 2 minute Basque tv  films of the event which give a good idea of the atmosphere:
http://www.eitb.com/es/videos/detalle/1231558/video-tamborrada-2013--la-lluvia-protagonista-donostia/
http://www.eitb.com/es/videos/detalle/1232004/video-tamborrada-donostia--arriada-real/
and a longer (6 min) French tv report which also catches the whole fiesta very well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlGgJRHUswc

We stayed there for an hour or so, caught up in the jubilant mood, listening to the bands, with the crowds singing along to the marches, which they clearly all knew very well, marched around town, and then wended our way back to the pension, encountering various bands and numerous scenes of street celebration on the way. 

We chickened out of staying up all night (unlike many of the natives), and instead retired to bed at about 2am, where we incredibly managed to sleep on and off despite a huge brass and drum band marching past our window every 30 minutes or so and the drunken revellings on the street outside. (We were staying, wouldn’t you know, on one of the popular drinking streets…)

Next morning, the rain had eased off a bit, and the bands were still going at it, with the rest of the day still to go. Unfortunately, we had to leave in the afternoon, so we weren’t able to see the finale back in the square at midnight.

There were so many amazing things about the whole event it’s difficult to know where to start. We were blown over – even more than we have been on previous similar occasions – by the extraordinary level of community commitment and coherence that enables this thing to happen. The population of San Sebastian is about 180,000 – the same size as York. I don’t think I could imagine 10,500 people rehearsing in bands for weeks and then dressing up in Napoleonic costume and taking to the streets to drum for 24 hours in the pouring rain in York, can you? Or many thousands of other people following them around and singing along to the marches.

Then there was the fact that it all went ahead in the face of such appalling weather – demonstrating the unshakeable Spanish determination to have fun (noisily in large groups) at the appointed times and places (preferably outside and in the middle of the night) regardless of any discomfort they might suffer in the process.

Then there was the bizarre sight of 10,000 people in Napoleonic costume wandering the streets.

And then there was the extraordinary number of drums. Somebody must be doing very well indeed from making and selling drums, Napoleonic military dress and chefs’ uniform in San Sebastian…  And drumming is clearly an everyday aspect of life in San Sebastian. The children of the town must get quite a shock when they go elsewhere and realise that in most places most people don’t play drums….

What’s it all about? Well, no-one quite knows the exact origin of the whole thing, but it seems to be some kind of merging of medieval fiesta traditions with celebrations for the liberation of San Sebastian from Napoleonic troops in 1813, when the British forced the French out whilst burning the town down. This year (2013) was the 200th anniversary of this event, so there were extra ceremonies and marches to celebrate this all day on Saturday before the fiesta itself began at midnight.

The other thing about the Tamborrada is that it is intimately connected with another typically idiosyncratic and extraordinary Basque tradition – the ‘txoko’. A ‘txoko’ is a community gastronomic society. There are hundreds of them. They can be found all over the Basque country, but the greatest concentration is in San Sebastian. Each txoko owns or rents its own private restaurant, where the members gather to cook meals (always traditional Basque food) for each other.

Until recently, they were all-male; now many of them admit women – though it is still the men who do the cooking.

Each txoko organises a drumming group in the Tamborrada. Before they are due to march, they have a big feast in their dining club for all the marchers, and then the marchers assemble in front of the txoko and set off to do their shift. 

Although the bands were originally all male, women now play a major part too (although controversially in some bands they are relegated to the role of barmaid, whilst in others they take an equal role as a soldier or chef.)

Here’s a recent article in the Guardian about the txokos:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/30/basque-country-big-society-spain

One of the amazing things about txokos is that, even without them, there are more communal places to eat and drink in the Basque Country than anywhere else you have ever seen. The ratio of bars and restaurants to people must be one of the smallest in the world (and nowhere more so than in San Sebastian); and yet they have txokos as well! It’s all indicative of the unusually strong link between food and community that is characteristic of this place.

As for San Sebastian itself, it’s a very beautiful city. Like many Basque towns and cities, it suffers from some really terrible post-war building (after German bombing in the Spanish Civil War) – and we didn’t really see it in the best weather conditions (although the sun did come out for a little while on Saturday), but its natural setting, a wonderful huge circular bay with broad sandy beach and impressive rocks framing the harbour, is fantastic, and the harbour and old town are very picturesque. We will go again in the summer and report more then.