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This isn’t the ideal thing to see when arriving at an airport lounge, although it is in keeping with my comments a few days ago about how busy these areas are becoming. However, modern travel does like to introduce little tests of character before granting access to the crisps, so I’m quite patient with these matters.

Fortunately, there was a wait of only around five minutes, and the staff were being proactive at getting customers in, so the situation never developed into full lounge-based civil unrest.

I was asked if it would be OK if I sat at the high seating at the rear where there was more space. This wasn’t just OK, this was positively optimal. There were lots of power points, seats and space, this was one for the win and all that.

It was much better than all that low down seating.

This is the other end of the lounge and I took this photo on the way out when this area became quieter.

I tried not to be greedy, but I struggled to control my chorizo consumption if I’m being honest.

Later on, they brought out pizza, which I thought was most agreeable, as there are few travel problems that cannot at least be partially improved by the sudden appearance of carbohydrates.

There were five different beers available, and I tried them all in the interests of research, although none troubled my Untappd high scoring section. But there are definitely worse ways to wait for an aircraft than with bread, chorizo and beer.

Oh, and cheese, crisps, olives and pastries because apparently I had accidentally embarked on a full Mediterranean grazing strategy. But this is what happens when I’m left unattended and not supervised.

The entrance to the lounge was much quieter than when I arrived. With that, it was time to go and hunt for my gate. My flight was half an hour late, something which the staff member told me on entry but which wasn’t updated for some time on the screens, and I could have stayed in the lounge for longer but I still had to go through border control.

The lounge doesn’t get the best of reviews, but I liked it and thought that it seemed well managed. When it was very busy they were getting a little behind, but they soon caught up with cleanliness and food restocking, with the choice of food and drink being agreeable. Walk-up entrance would be £38.50 which feels rather high, but isn’t entirely unreasonable given that the lounge is comfortable and the dining options are acceptable. I used my annual Priority Pass card as usual so I didn’t have to dwell on the value for money arrangement.

I mentioned that getting the bus from Bilbao airport to the city centre was more complex than I would have liked, with the tourist information office explaining to me that the information on Google was incorrect. Most bus companies might respond to this by correcting the information, but evidently some prefer a more adventurous approach to public transport. Anyway, I thought that it would be easier coming back, which was a touching little moment of optimism.

This sign made no sense to me. It appeared to be the airport bus stop, and therefore the sort of place where an airport bus might reasonably stop. But on the little plan, it seemed to suggest that the bus actually stopped on the other side of the road. I decided this must just be me failing to interpret local bus signage correctly, so as I was early (well, obviously for me, I was heading to the airport), I walked the ten minutes to the next bus stop back along the route.

At the next stop, I was pleased to see three separate passenger groups with big bags who were evidently going to the airport. I decided to ask one of them if they were going to the airport and the friendly guy said yes and I was reassured that he was Spanish and so seemed to know what he was doing.

Anyway, the bus turns up and the driver says “this isn’t the airport stop”. I did wonder why a decision had been made to put the airport bus sign up at this location given that, but I didn’t want to sound like I was querying the local transport authorities. There were some discussions in Spanish and the outcome was that the driver said that the actual stop was 100 metres down the road and on the other side of the road. We got there and there was absolutely no airport bus signage there, but there was the airport bus and so that was a result.

The driver was very friendly and I got my favoured seat at the front, so all was well. But they wonder why people miss buses, it really shouldn’t be that difficult to put bus stop signs up at the right place and have buses stop at them. If it had just been myself that was muddled up, I would have assumed I was an idiot, but it was evident that others were also confused. Anyway, that meant that I was safely back at Bilbao Airport….

This is the former convent church of St. Francis and these are the oldest parts of the site. Most of this stonework dates from the fifteenth century and the only element not exposed is the apse. That remains underneath the current Civic Centre, and the authorities have apparently decided not to demolish an entire public building in the interests of archaeological completeness. This feels restrained, if slightly disappointing for those of us who enjoy history but do not have to manage civic budgets.

I’m standing on a raised platform here that would have been within the church and those rectangles are graves which were placed in the nave, in the chapels and also outside the church. There was a single nave which was 13 metres wide, with six chapels on either side and they seem to have used all of the space available.

The side chapels were paid for by wealthier members of Bilbao society, who evidently wanted a little posthumous exclusivity and a good spiritual position for the afterlife. In the Catholic world of the period, burial close to altars and sacred spaces mattered, and the church was not about fairness, it was about money.

The remains of the original pillars are still visible, and it is striking how deep some of the tombs once went. There is just enough here to understand the scale of the church, but it has been changed so much, and indeed nearly entirely demolished, which makes interpretation just a little more difficult.

I was encouraged by the Reproductions Museum to visit the nearby archaeological site at Heart of Mary Square in Bilbao, and I am pleased to report that I obeyed. It wasn’t clear to me if this site is routinely open to the public, I showed a ticket I was given and was escorted to this rather interesting little arrangement. This is the site of the old Convent of San Francisco, founded in 1498, including parts of its Gothic church, one of its cloisters and the Tertiary Room.

The convent did not have a quiet retirement after its closure in 1821 as the site was then used as a cemetery and a hospital, with the religious complex being mostly demolished over the next few decades. In 1865, the Cuartel del Príncipe Alfonso was built on the same site, replacing the vanished convent with military architecture and giving the ground yet another role in Bilbao’s history.

However, in 2005, the archaeological remains of the religious site were excavated and all remains of the former barracks, as well as the school buildings constructed in 1931 were removed. These photos show the former cloisters area and the survival of this helps give a shape to the rest of the remains.

I will come back to the ‘Giants and Bigheads’ in another post, because they deserve separate treatment and also because it is not every day that archaeology is interrupted by what appear to be enormous ceremonial people waiting patiently indoors.

This artwork is titled ‘Industrial Assembly at the Shipyard’ and was painted by Agustín Ibarrola (1930-2023) in around 1965. This is, I think, a political painting which shows a scene of a mass of workers gathered beside a shipyard, with cranes towering above them and a ship emerging through the smoke and shadow. It is not a gentle maritime scene of ropes, sails and someone looking wistfully out to sea. This is heavier than that, it’s a statement about workers and their importance to the economy. It was also one of my favourite paintings in the galleries, it felt like it had a meaning that I could understand which is always handy in an art gallery.

I’m mentioning this political angle as the artist seems something of a character. He was a committed anti-Franco activist and member of the Communist Party who was arrested in 1962, tried by a military court and was imprisoned for several years at Burgos jail. His art was closely bound up with workers’ struggles, repression and resistance to the dictatorship, which helps explain why ‘Industrial Assembly at the Shipyard’ feels less like a decorative dockside scene and more like a political statement with cranes.

Later in life, his politics shifted towards outspoken opposition to ETA and support for civic anti-terrorist movements, so his career was marked by a long and rather costly commitment to political liberty, expressed through paint and evidently a notable refusal to keep quiet. ETA might have ceased their campaign of terror, but anyone prepared to stand up to them at the time was certainly brave.

I was encouraged by a museum to visit this nearby archaeological site, so there will inevitably be a few posts about it. This is what happens when museums make helpful suggestions. They create content for me, and I become powerless to resist.

One of the items on display was this door, which was once the entrance to the parish church of Saint John the Baptist of Sondika. The building was demolished in 1939 when they decided they’d construct Bilbao Airport and the church was one of the casualties of that which is I suppose sub-optimal from a heritage perspective.

One of the architects of the new airport was Manuel Ignacio Galíndez Zabala (1892-1980) who was a local man who had an interest in history. He was the man who rescued the door and he donated it to the Euskal Museum and in recent years it has been moved to the Heart of Mary Square site. The entire church might have been lost, but at least someone had the foresight to save the front door and I think it looks like it was well worth saving.

I did try and find which bit of the airport the church would have been under, but I can’t find any old Spanish maps with enough detail to achieve that.

This is a ‘View of Bilbao’ by an anonymous 17th-century artist, and I do rather like old city views. They are part artwork, part map, part civic boast and part “we had better record this before someone builds something inconvenient” although the whole arrangement is relatively unrecognisable today. This one is especially interesting as it is described as the earliest known pictorial depiction of the city, which makes it rather more useful than my usual approach of photographing a railway station sign and hoping that counts as documentation.

The angel at the top of the painting adds a further note of drama, because clearly a normal cityscape was not enough and Bilbao required airborne supervision. I respect that. If I were producing the earliest known view of a city, it seems sensible to include a celestial endorsement, just in case future generations questioned whether the municipal layout had been properly authorised. Although the artist isn’t known, records do note that it was commissioned by the trader John Seale and it was painted in the Miribilla district.

There’s a load of detail packed into this as well. There are boats on the river, little figures on the quayside, buildings lined up with a pleasing sense of order and the surrounding landscape pressing in behind the city. It shows Bilbao as a compact river city, long before the modern version of galleries, tramlines, bridges and tourists attempting to identify pintxos without looking too foolish, but it clearly has the river at the heart of the whole arrangement.

As I’m not a student of Spanish history, I’m not entirely sure what all these buildings are by the river, they look more like warehouses than residential. It all feels like a working city and the museum is very pleased at this artwork and they’ve just had it restored.