Discovered yesterday that we have two free tours included in the cruise package! Trips to Bilbao and Santiago de Compostella.
Bonus!
Early alarm call at 7am, already in Getxo harbour, then a quick cuppa and a stroll round the deck while V gets herself ready for breakfast. There was the usual scrum for breakfast, then on to the tour bus and away in to Bilbao. My initial impression is the similarity to Sheffield; not just because of its recent past as the steel capital of Spain, but the situation with high hills and the post-industrial landscape, now filled with new housing and shopping areas.
The bus took us past the sights, the Titanium-clad Guggenheim museum with its floral dog, and dropped us in the old town where we were left to wander around on our own due to the guide setting off before giving everyone a toilet break. Bad form if you ask me! Like most of Spain, going to the toilet involves buying a couple of “cafes con leche.” The extent of my Spanish these days.
Bilbao is a very impressive place; it has had huge amounts of investment to transform a run-down steel town in to a modern European city of culture. Clean? The total lack of litter in the streets made me realise what shit-holes London or Manchester are by comparison and, having watched the feral looting thugs on Sky News last night, I just felt even more ashamed to be British.
I asked our guide where the money came from to fund this investment and it seems to be a very good example of the type of public-private partnership that the new UK government is moving towards. I asked him about debts and apparently Bilbao is the only Spanish city that does not have any! If that is true we have something to learn from them.
Returning to Getxo, past the mansions of the rich and influential of Bilbao's past and present, you realise that this is the Monte Carlo of Northern Spain; mansions owned by olive oil magnates and steel barons who've now sold their old steel mills, brick by brick, machine by machine, to Mital, to rebuild in India where the labour's cheaper and less demanding. I guess it must be these same companies that have backed the government and invested in Bilbao's reconstruction.
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