Bilbao Old Town to Guggenheim Self-Guided Walk with Puppy and Maman

The audio guide does the talking and the walker sets the speed. The route starts where Bilbao did, in the medieval Old Town, where the first stop recalls the days when merchants, saints and sheep shared the riverside, and it ends in front of the Guggenheim after eleven stops.

La Ribera comes early, billed as Europe's largest food market and rebuilt after a flood. Plaza Miguel de Unamuno and Plaza Nueva follow, then the Arriaga Theatre, with a past of dreams, disasters and maybe a few ghosts, and a Belle Epoque railway station. Along the river the stories turn to the Zubizuri, the white footbridge by Santiago Calatrava, opened in 1997 and called controversial. Then come the Guggenheim's outdoor works: Jeff Koons's Puppy, a 43-foot terrier covered in flowers, from 1992, and Louise Bourgeois's Maman, a spider with marble eggs, from 1999.

The walk ends in front of the museum, which opened in October 1997. Anyone who has already been inside, or plans to go, gets the other half of the story here, and a stop for pintxos fits anywhere along the river.