Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Frank Gehry's museum on the Nervión is the building that gave architecture a phrase: the "Bilbao effect", the idea that one daring cultural project can turn round a declining industrial city. In 1991 the Basque Government offered to pay for a Guggenheim museum on the run-down riverside port land, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation agreed to run it. King Juan Carlos I opened it on 18 October 1997. Within its first three years close to four million people came, and the regional council reckoned that tax on their spending more than repaid the construction bill.

Look at it from the river first. At street level the building is fairly quiet; from the water side and the bridges you see the full, restless pile of curved forms clad in about 33,000 thin titanium plates, laid like fish scales, above a base of beige limestone quarried near Granada. Gehry's office modelled the shapes with CATIA, aerospace design software, and that let the job finish on time and on budget, which is rare for a building this complicated. Inside, everything opens off a tall glass atrium that Gehry called "the Flower", with views out to the estuary and the green hills around the city.

The one permanent display is Richard Serra's The Matter of Time, a group of huge weathering-steel spirals and ellipses in the long Arcelor Gallery on the ground floor. Walk through them, don't just look: the curving walls lean in and out, and the floor seems to shift under you. The rest of the nineteen galleries hold changing exhibitions. The ten rectangular rooms sit behind the stone walls; the nine irregular ones sit behind the titanium. Outside, the museum's own art is on show for free. Jeff Koons's Puppy, a flowering West Highland terrier about 13 metres tall, stands on the plaza. Louise Bourgeois's bronze spider Maman and Anish Kapoor's stack of mirrored spheres, Tall Tree & the Eye, look out over the river, and at intervals Fujiko Nakaya's fog sculpture rises from the pool.

Getting there

The museum stands on the riverbank about 1 km from the centre of Bilbao, an easy walk along the Nervión promenade, and the city's tram has a stop named Guggenheim right beside it. Bilbao Airport (BIO) is about 4 km away in a straight line over the hills to the north; the trip by road is longer.