Bilbao

Bilbao is one of mainland Spain's ten largest cities, also the most populous in the Basque country. It's on the country's north coast facing the Bay of Biscay, hence the local province is called Biscay (in Spanish) or Bizkaia (in Basque). The metropolitan area mostly follows a long estuary flanked by hills, with the city centre about ten miles from the sea. Bilbao used to be a industrial town linked to a busy port but has reinvented itself in recent years as a serious tourist draw. And the building which kickstarted this incredible revolution is this. It's the Guggenheim Museum, an explosion of shiny metalwork which opened beside the Nervión river in 1997. The Basque government had seen the transformative power the Olympics had brought to Barcelona and were keen to wave a similar wand over Bilbao. They approached the Guggenheim Foundation with a proposal to build their third great museum (after those in New York and Venice), and they in turn approached the architect Frank Gehry to…