Mercado de la Ribera

Welcome to the belly of Bilbao. We're starting here, at the Mercado de la Ribera, because before this city was faith, before it was Basque pride, before any of the grand stone churches we'll visit — it was hunger, and the market that fed it. Stand here for a second and just take it in. The long, low building stretching along the river like a docked ocean liner, the smell of the estuary mixing with fish and coffee and cured ham drifting out of the doors. This is where the everyday life of the Old Town beats loudest, and it has done so for a very, very long time.

Here's the thing that catches most first-time visitors off guard. This isn't just an old market — it sits on a spot that has sold food since the town was founded. When Bilbao got its founding charter back in 1300, a market was already trading right here on the riverbank. So for more than seven centuries, roughly forty generations of people, this exact patch of ground beside the water has been where locals came to buy their dinner. The building has changed, the stalls have changed, the fish have (mostly) changed — but the habit hasn't. That's the thread I want you to carry with you all morning: the Old Town of Bilbao, the famous Seven Streets we're about to walk into, is not a museum. It's a living, breathing, eating neighbourhood, and this market is proof of it.

Now look up at the building itself, because it's a beauty. What you're seeing went up in 1929, and it's pure Art Deco — those clean geometric lines, the ship-like curves, the wonderful stained glass. The architect leaned right into the riverside setting and made it look like a great vessel moored at the quay. For years it held a record as one of the largest covered markets in all of Europe, an enormous cathedral to food. And that word, cathedral, is deliberate — because today we're going to climb from the belly of Bilbao to its soul, and it feels right to begin in the place that nourishes the body before we go looking for the places that nourish the spirit.

Let me tell you how the market works, because it's split into two worlds. Head upstairs and you're in the traditional market — the working stalls where the fishmongers and butchers and greengrocers still trade, where local abuelas come with their trolleys and argue about the price of hake, where the fish counters glisten with the day's catch straight from the Cantabrian Sea. This is the real thing, still doing the job it was built for. Then come down to the lower level and everything shifts. Down here is the gastronomic plaza — a buzzing, modern hall of pintxo bars and stalls where you eat rather than shop. Txakoli, the crisp, slightly fizzy Basque white wine, gets poured for you from a height to give it some air. Little skewers of anchovy, olive and pickled pepper — the gilda, named, cheekily, after Rita Hayworth's film character because it was considered "green, salty and a little bit spicy." Try one. This is Bilbao saying hello.

And that brings me to a first, gentle lesson in pintxo etiquette, because you'll want it later. Pintxos aren't a sit-down meal. The Basque way is to stand, order a drink and one or two pintxos, eat them at the bar, and then move on to the next place. Five bars, fifteen minutes each — that's a proper evening. Don't plant yourself at a table and expect it all to come to you. The whole point is the movement, the crowd, the crawl from counter to counter. Here it even has a name, the txikiteo or poteo, the ritual little wander from bar to bar with a small glass in hand. Keep that in your back pocket, because later in the tour I'm going to take you to Plaza Nueva — the other great temple of pintxos in this Old Town, a grand arcaded square where the bars are lined up shoulder to shoulder. This market is one shrine to Bilbao's edible soul; Plaza Nueva is the other. We'll get there.

While you're standing here, cast your eye just up the river to that lovely Gothic church almost leaning over the water — that's San Antón, and it's woven right into the city's identity; the church and its old bridge actually appear on Bilbao's coat of arms. Market and church, side by side on the riverbank, food and faith within a stone's throw of each other. That's not a coincidence, it's the whole story of this neighbourhood in a single view: the sacred and the delicious, always sharing the same streets.

So here's where we're heading. Think of today as a climb, from the belly to the soul. We begin right here, in the market and the pintxo streets — the living, everyday, delicious Old Town. From here we'll step into the medieval bones of the place: the cathedral, and the original Seven Streets that gave this quarter its name. Then we go deeper, into the Basque layer — the museum, the squares, the very place where the Basque language is guarded and taught. And then, quite literally, we rise: up a long flight of stairs, into a hilltop park where an old steelworks chimney ties this hill back to Bilbao's iron-and-fire industrial story, and finally to the basilica of the Amatxu, the "little mother" who watches over the whole city from the top.

Belly to soul. Let's begin. Finish that last bite, and follow me out toward the cathedral.