December started in excellent style with a rum and coke at Edinburgh airport prior to boarding Easyjet's flight to Bilbao at teatime on the 1st.  Flight duration and time difference meant that we arrived at our Air B&B fairly late on Saturday evening.  But thanks to the Spanish way of life this was no impediment to finding a pleasant spot in the Casco Viejo to eat and drink.  Indeed we homed in on a delightful colonnaded square where given the mildness of the evening we sat outdoors.  Ross stripped down to short sleeves but I stuck to my warm jacket and bunnet.

The main objective of the trip was to visit the Guggenheim.  It fully repaid the effort.  It's an awesome building and from our lodgings it was a lovely walk along the river with a pitstop in a little cafe for breakfast. ( On the other two mornings we had breakfast in the Ribera market which is every bit as enchanting as La Boqueria in Barcelona.)

Here's a view along the river

First sight of the building.  The tall curved structures form outposts to the main building which you can see rising up beyond the bridge.

Closer to with a giant spider to the right

A view through the spider

 

Alongside with the Ibedrola (parent of Scottish Power) skyscraper in the background

Jeff Koons' puppy that stands guard over the entrance

And finally the whole building seen from the opposite bank of the river 

That's just the outside and however impressive and exciting it may be it's by the contents that it ultimately is judged.  Like most galleries, because in English usage it's a gallery not a museum, it has a permanent collection and temporary exhibitions.  For my money the large steel structures by Richard Serra are the stars of the permanent, or at least longterm exhibits: they promised him a twenty five year tenure.  You can see them here.

There was an exhibition of Giacometti sculptures on while we were there and one called Van Gogh to Picasso.  I've always like Giacometti's stick men and his out of proportion figures so I found this a real treat.  Photography was prohibited so I exercised my meagre sketching talent by drawing the piece I liked best. This is it here (not my sketch - the piece itself).

The Van Gogh to Picasso was also excellent.  I particularly liked early works by Picasso that I hadn't seen before which were naturalist paintings, done many years before he embarked on the abstract works that I most closely associate him with.

Bilbao is not just the Guggenheim.  There's another lovely gallery that we managed to visit and various museums that we didn't.  A pretty park with a lovely fountain, an arts centre in a converted wine warehouse and lots and lots of other things that meant that two and half days were completely inadequate.  Must go back.