The Basque country.

Well, we’re on holiday again! This is the second bit of the Wellington odyssey. The latest point we reached last year was Freineda, where we saw the house that was Wellington’s winter quarters 1812 – 1813. He spent the time planning a daring advance – a small part of the army was sent out on the road to Salamanca, as the French expected, but the greater part carried out a strenuous and totally unexpected forced march through the mountains of Tras Os Montes, which was deemed to be impossible. This outflanked the French, who fell back right into the Basque country and abandoned Madrid.

We’ve decided to miss out Tras Os Montes, and begin with the battle of Vitoria. So we flew to Biarritz and picked up a hire car. As the flight was from Stansted, we drove down there on the previous evening, and it was a lovely journey, the most beautiful summer evening with glorious light, and during the last forty five minutes, a heart stoppingly gorgeous sunset, leaving us feeling wonderfully calm and peaceful.  “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”

Unfortunately the weather on arrival had the opposite effect. The head winds were such, that I don’t think I’ve ever had a heavier landing, and we disembarked to pouring rain. It was so bad that we were reminded of arriving at Haugesund in Norway, a couple of years ago.

So we picked up the hire car, getting soaked in the process, and set off for Bilbao. What we could see of the scenery looked lovely, green and mountainous, but the cloud cover was down to about ten feet, and it was still pouring down.

Bilbao has nothing much to do with Wellington, although he had switched the navy supply vessels to Santander before the march commenced, and as the French were forced to withdraw their garrisons, other ports were used too, including Bilbao. But it does have the Guggenheim, and, very importantly, it has a transporter bridge! In fact it has the earliest transporter bridge in the world (1893), and it’s a UNESCO world heritage site. It was blown up during the Spanish Civil War, but rebuilt soon after. So, first things first, we drove straight to see the bridge. Strictly, it isn’t in Bilbao, but down the river in a separate municipality called Portugalete.  Luckily, by the time we got there it had stopped raining. Personally, I think “our” transporter is better looking, but this one has a much more modern gondola. It looked slightly out of place, to be honest. But the Portugalete one really scores on surroundings – there’s smart looking houses, an attractive promenade, a bandstand, and lots of people taking their evening walk or jog. The Middlesbrough one is in the middle of a wasteland of industrial dereliction.

The queue to cross in the gondola.

There’s still quite a bit of industrial dereliction in Bilbao, but on the whole it feels busy and thriving, and we liked it.  There’s lots of smart fin de siècle blocks of mansion flats, often with nice art nouveau touches, and the river valley is narrow and deep so you can always see lovely green hills behind the buildings, and there are plenty of attractive parks and squares.

The next day (today) we had a good breakfast and went across the Calatrava bridge to the Guggenheim. Well, there’s two and a half hours of my life I won’t get back. No, stop it, let’s find the positives.

The building is certainly striking, but in the Sydney Opera House way – a triumph of form over function. I did like the Bourgeois Maman spider, and Anish Kapoor’s bubbles, and Koon's "Puppy", 

"Maman"

See the reflections? 

but you don’t actually need to go into the place to enjoy those. I didn’t like anything at all inside. There actually isn’t that much, anyway. I was looking forward to seeing Serra’s huge installation “The Matter of Time”, but it left me very cold. In fact, it made me think of the ancient turf maze at Saffron Walden, which does what Serra whittered on about on the audioguide much better, and no one gets pretentious about it.

It honestly wasn’t a case of over expectation either; I have had my doubts about anything labelled Guggenheim since we went to New York to find the Guggenheim there had removed all the paintings and sculptures to house a huge display of Armani clothes.

The last straw was finding out that you have to go out of the museum to get a coffee and a sit down. At that point patience was exhausted and, having had our coffee and sit, we didn’t go back inside.

We realised we were near the Cinderella art museum, the Bellas Artes, which has a couple of El Grecos, several Murrillos and Zurbarans, plus lots of Spanish and specifically Basque artists. There were some good modern works too – Chillida and Tony Craggs.

By this time it was sheeting down, so we sat for a while, then when it slowed up we went to the old part of the town, which is early nineteenth century, not really old old, but quite pleasant. Then we had a very late lunch, and returned to the hotel back over the Calatrava bridge. While I’m grumbling, I must say it disappointed me. It’s called the white bridge, but it’s quite discoloured; while being on the bridge itself, surrounded by the supports, is good and feels a bit like being in a bird cage, the approaches are ugly.  Also, it has a glass deck, meant to be illuminated from below by coloured lights at night, which sounds as though it would be lovely, but the whole effect is ruined because the glass deck turned out to be lethally slippy in wet weather (Surprise!) and has had to be covered with plastic matting.

"Puppy" - kudos to the gardeners, who don't get a mention.

Tomorrow we’re off to the battlefield of Vitoria, so back with Wellington.