About Access Bilbao

What this site is

Twenty sights in Bilbao, one page each, and eleven sections on how the city works: arriving by air, rail, road and sea, getting around by Metro, tram, bus and funicular, the city's transformation from shipyards to museums, the Basque language, the seasons and the August festival, what to eat and drink, where to stay, what to book ahead, itineraries from one day to five, and day trips across the Basque Country. There is also a journal of longer answers to the questions visitors ask most.

Every page tries to answer what a visitor actually needs: what a place is, what you see when you get there, how to visit it, what to combine it with, and where a well-known story is a legend rather than a fact.

It is not a listings site. There are no opening hours, admission prices or fares anywhere on it, because those change, and the operator is the only source that is right on the day you travel.

What Bilbao means here

This site keeps to the city of Bilbao along its Ría, from the old town to the Euskalduna, with the hill of Artxanda above it, and follows the river down to its mouth at the Bizkaia Bridge and Getxo, which are part of every visit. The other Basque cities and the coast of Biscay appear on the day trips page rather than as sights.

How it is written

Each page is built from sources that are named at the foot of it, and the facts in it, such as dates, heights, distances and who built what, are checked against those sources before the page is published. Where the sources disagree, the page says so or leaves the number out.

Access Bilbao is written and maintained with the assistance of AI, edited and fact-checked before publication. Anything wrong is worth pointing out, and will be corrected.

The site was rebuilt in October 2026. Every page of the earlier version kept its address, and each was rewritten and checked again against its sources.

The photographs

Every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons and is credited on the page it appears on, with the photographer's name, the license and a link to the file.

They are chosen by looking at them: recent rather than archival, showing the place the page is about, and captioned from what is actually in the frame. Many files labeled Bilbao show another Guggenheim, a street of the same name in another city, a different estuary town or a place far from the river, so each one is checked before it is used.

What it costs you

Nothing. A few planning pages carry affiliate links, marked as such before the first one, and the privacy page explains what that means. No page about a sight carries one, and nothing on this site is recommended because of a commission.