Bilbao has undergone an amazing rejuvenation in the past few years, becoming an international center of art and culture, and its tourist industry is booming. A new airport terminal and improved public transport have helped make the city and surrounding area a more appealing and convenient destination for travelers. 'El Goog', as the Basques call Frank Gehry's titanium wonder, was meant to attract attention, and it has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams. But there's more to Bilbao than the Guggenheim Museum, and there's much, much more to the Basques, Europe's oldest people. Cadogan takes you through their stunning habitat of velvet green mountains, immaculate villages, vineyards, and ancient holy places. This first ever guide to the entire Basque country (including both the Spanish and French sides of the border), gives you the lowdown on the Basques' history, culture, ancient language, festivals, and explores the dramatic vistas of the Pyrenees. With Cadogan's expert guidance, visit vibrant Vittoria and live it up in the glittering resort of Biarritz.

Explores the heart of one of Europe's most distinctive regions, with its stunning architecture, chic seaside towns and breathtaking mountains. This title helps you discover some of Spain's most exuberant fiestas. It also details perfect places to stay for any budget including sophisticated 17th-century paradores and idyllic mountain retreats.

In this guidebook to the Spanish and French Basque Country and Navarre, Murray Stewart covers the principal cities - rejuvenated Bilbao, beautiful San Sebastian, verdant Vitoria and lively Pamplona - and also delves deeper into the region's interior, capturing the quirkiness that make it so special

The Basque Country is a land of fascinating paradoxes and enigmas. Home to one of Europe's oldest peoples and most mysterious languages, with a living folklore rich in archaic rituals and dances, it also boasts a dynamic post-modern energy, with the reinvention of Bilbao creating a model for the twenty-first-century city of cultural services and information technologies. Hugging the elbow of the Bay of Biscay on both the French and Spanish sides of the Pyrenees, this small territory abounds in big contrasts, ranging from moist green valleys to semi-desert badlands, from snowy sierras to sandy beaches, from harsh industrial landscapes to bucolic beech woods. This often idyllic scenery is the stage for fierce political passions. Almost every aspect of the Basque Country generates passionate disagreement, even its precise location. Spanish and French centralism, often authoritarian and sometimes brutal, has met with resistance for two centuries. Most recently and notoriously ETA, a terrorist group with deep popular support, has engaged in a bloody 45-year conflict. But many Basques consider themselves full French or Spanish citizens, and fear political and linguistic exclusion under Basque nationalist rule.

This title brings together walks and tours in the Basque region of Spain and France, which runs east from Bilbao to Biarritz and takes in famous places like Pamplona and stages on the Way of St James to Santiago de Compostela

On a transatlantic flight between Bilbao and New York City, a fictional version of Kirmen Uribe recalls three generations of family history—the inspiration for the novel he wants to write—and ponders how the sea has shaped their stories. The day he knew he was going to die, our narrator’s grandfather took his daughter-in-law to the Fine Arts Museum in Bilbao, the de facto capital of the Basque region of northern Spain, to show her a painting with ties to their family. Years later, her son Kirmen traces those ties back through the decades, knotting together moments from early twentieth-century art history with the stories of his ancestors’ fishing adventures—and tragedies—in the North Atlantic Ocean. Elegant, fluid storytelling is punctuated by scenes from Kirmen’s flight, from security line to airport bar to jet cabin, and reflections on the creative writing process. This original and compelling novel earned debut author Kirmen Uribe the prestigious National Prize for Literature in Spain in 2009. Exquisitely translated from Basque to English by Elizabeth Macklin, Bilbao–New York–Bilbao skillfully captures the intersections of many journeys: past and present, physical and artistic, complete and still unfolding. Bilbao–New York–Bilbao is the second book commissioned for the Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen. The series investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming.