Henry Moore in Bilbao, Henry Moore in Spain

An exhibition consisting of seven sculptures by Henry Moore has been touring Spain since october 2013. It started in the Canary Islands. It's ending now in the city of Bilbao, in the Basque Country. It will be here until the 17th of July. Information about this exhibition can be found at the web of The Henry Moore Foundation, here.
If you want to see what the exhibition looked like in different surroundings, here are some sites and blogs where you can find out. The sculptures have been travelling, as you can see, from South to North.
Santa Cruz de Tenerife
Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
Seville
Valencia  (The news in El País, in english here)

 The exhibition is displayed these days by the Fine Arts Museum of Bilbao, inside the Park of doña Casilda Iturrizar. The place looks something like this

Every City: a poem by José Fernández de la Sota

Every city's a remembrance
Somebody leaves in some taxi.
Every portrait, a reflection
Of a dissapearing one passing.

For many years I've been living
–Too many years– on this stage.
Every stage is like a mirror
Where life is struggling to stay.

All my life I have been walking
Through a reduced city expansion.
There's a maze with no way out
Behind every horizon.

I play the game without caring
For the outcome. I've been playing
For a long time. Every city
Is a game board warped in pity

Every country is a lying
Past that we cannot predict.
Every city is a wound
And a hospital –derelict–.

Translated by: me

José Fernández de la Sota was born in Bilbao in 1960.
He is at present the most important poet in the city.

 

BBK LIVE 2013, Mark Lanegan is coming to town

The official poster,

the official programme.

Clic on the
BBK Live Festival Logo
to go to the official Web Site

Ercilla Street loves rainy days

Take this walk along Ercilla Street in a rainy day from Mazarredo Boulevard to Moyua Circus... I mean, Alameda Mazarredo and Plaza Moyua. Bilbao isn't a city full of great monuments like many cities in Spain. No Roman aqueducts, no arab palaces here. That's why we had to buy that huge titanium castle,  Frank Gehry's contribution to the appeal of the city. The beauty of this place lies in those everyday surroundings where people's lifes take place. This is just another little bourgeois city of Europe grown into one of those  conurbations that melt diferent locations into one big map. Bilbao has climbed the mountains that encircle but in the mind of many of it's inhabitants it's still made of it's two old cores: the medieval one and the XIXth, Xxth Century one. Ercilla Street runs at the heart of the latter. There are many interesting buildings here, traditional ones, moderns ones, old and new. The street still has the atmosphere of something coming from the growth of the Ensanche, that is, the city expansion that jumped to the other side of the river from the Old Quartier. That was quite a long time ago...

Click on the photograph and get going

 

Hotels in Bilbao

I bring you a most useful link for finding hotels in Bilbao.

Booking.com

Fifty hotels in Bilbao

Bilbao BBK Live Festival 2012

Bilbao BBK Live Festival has ended. When it was still to begin, efestivals, the web guide to festivals all over the world, gave some clues to those who were planning to travel to Bilbao for the fun and the music


Click on the image below to follow the link and, if you haven't come this year, think of visiting us next summer. You know, for the fun and the music and for a city which is, like any other city, just a piece of the City of the World, that discontinuous habitat which tends to melt in the pot of Global Urban Culture, offering still thousands of variations in each of its "regions".

March Stroll

I'ts Springtime and we are going out on a stroll at the heart of Bilbao. I'ts a changing, uneasy Spring. I'ts March. The sun is up there, so bright, lighting up the city. It has been doing that all morning. But suddenly, the afternoon becomes dark and windy, with clouds in the sky above the river and a grey, blueish light over that giant metal sculpture called Guggenheim Museum.We start walking at the cross between Dr. Areilza's Avenue and Licenciado Poza Street. We walk towards the Gran Via or Main Street and we reach the Park. We turn right and walk along the border of the Park untill we reach Teofilo Guiard Square and, leaving the Fine Arts Museum (Museo de Bellas Artes) at our left, we enter Colón de Larreategui Street. At San José Plaza (Saint Joseph Square) we turn to the left and we move along  Iparraguire Street towards the Guggenheim Museum. When we get there, we go into the building through the main entrance and we cross to the rear one through the shops (the first one is a book shop). Once on the other side, we turn lef again and go though the playgrounds and gardens to Abandoibarra Avenue. At our back we leave the Guggenheim Museum. In front of us are now the Deusto University Library and the
Auditorium of the Basque Country University (UPV). If we continue our stroll between them we reach plaza Euskadi, and from there we can easily go back into the Park and the Gran Via.

Everybody knows that Frank Gehry is the arquitect who designed the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, but, of course, when an old industrial city tries to rebuild itself local authorities cannot avoid the temptation of collecting important international signatures. The Library of the Deusto University is Rafael Moneo's work. But my favorite of the two, and probably mi favorite building in the new Bilbao surrounding Abandoibarra, is Alvaro Siza's work for the Basque Country University. So clean, so pure and beautiful... There's nothing like it in this new Bilbao which is becoming perhaps too showy.

Here we go. You can both roll down or click on the first image to open the slide show

Back to the park