Five Cool Things About Bilbao

BILBAO, Spain - There are, of course, more than five cool things about Bilbao, the largest city in Spain's Basque Country and one of the best places to travel in northern Spain. However, these are five things I found especially appealing on my first visit to the city and its rugged, green, mountainous surrounds:

1. The Guggenheim Bilbao. No surprise here. This riverside art museum, designed by Canadian- born, Los Angeles-based architect Frank Gehry, has been a sensation since it opened in 1997. It is still a wonderment. I find Gehry, with his computer-based designs and use of nontraditional materials like titantium, becoming a cartoon of himself. Simply put, his signature use of bent ribbons of metal atop his buildings is becoming mannered. But in this branch of New York's famed Guggenheim, all of Gehry's ideas come together to make a thing of beauty; it is his masterpiece. I caught a brilliant exhibition by the British Indian artist and, for want of a better word, sculptor Amish Kapoor inside; Kapoor's use of form and color is compelling and unique and worth seeing anywhere. But while it may have been said before that the art of the Guggenheim Bilbao is the museum itself, it having been said before doesn't make it any less true.

2. Riverside Bilbao. Up until 1984, shipyards and piers for the Port of Bilbao lined the polluted Rio Nervion on its sluggish way through the city center. No longer. A visionary city master plan that preceeded the Guggenheim by more than a decade cleared out the old industrial sector, cleaned up the Nervion's waters and installed interesting public art and a relaxed waterside promenade punctuated by a children's playground, plantings and the occasional cafe. The result is a brilliantly reinvented city center that puts most notions of "urban renewal'' to shame. Bilbao did it right. And the process isn't stopping. A glassy, curved highrise by Ceasar Pelli is rising just downriver from the Guggenheim, and the new building promises to become another jewel in Bilbao's crown. Truly, this is a city of architecture.

3. Public transport. It may sound prosaic, praising workaday public transport, but when you try to get around a new city as a foreign visitor, you appreciate the efficiency and even beauty of a first-class public transport system. Modern trams cross the city and thread through greenways beside the river promenade, there is a good system of city buses, and the Norman Foster-designed Metro (the subway) is fast, clean, safe and appealing to the eye. The only missing piece is a dedicated airport Metro line from downtown. The present airport bus is not esthetically pleasing but it costs only 1 euro 15 cents and runs every 20 minutes in peak daytime hours.

4. The Port of Bilbao's new passenger marine terminal. Located downriver from the city center near the mouth of the Nervion, the bright, glassy, airy terminal is scheduled to open right about now. Bilbao is pushing hard to grow its cruise ship business and is seeing success. The port city is on cruise ship routes rounding the Iberian Peninsula between the Mediterranean Sea, England and other key ports in continental Western Europe.

5. Strolling Old Town. The historic quarter, well-served by the Metro and other public transport, is a fine place for strolling, shopping, eating and gawking. Again, it is clean and safe and its compact size and narrow, pedestrian-friendly shopping lanes present a pleasing prospect for travelers. Streets are well-marked in Spanish and Basque, there are plenty of cafes and restaurants and the old town doesn't lack pretty churches and fine examples of traditional architecture. The ornate former main railroad station affords some good photo ops and the entire district achieves a rare balance between being busy and being laid-back.

Other than the Guggenheim, I knew nothing about Bilbao before this visit. I'm glad I came.

Travel Alerts, and Common Sense

I just returned from a trip to Europe. Nothing extraordinary about that, except that Americans and many others should consider not traveling to Europe, we are told. Why? Terrorist attacks. Sez who? The governments of the United States, United Kingdom and several other nations.

I am not one to minimize the risk of danger in travel. I am not one to maximize it, either. There have been terrorist attacks in Europe in recent years, but as I can report with some authority, the continent is not blowing up left and right just now. I was in Spain, which suffered a horrendous attack several years ago when politicized Islamic fanatics bombed commuter trains in Madrid. The armed Basque separatist group ETA has also launched fatal attacks at various times over the years in Spain. However, people have got to go on about their business, which most Spaniards have done - usually without untoward results. Travelers should do the same.

As it happens, I was in Basque country last week. My surroundings did not look or feel unsafe and I did not feel threatened hop-scotching from Bilbao to San Sebastian and across the border into France. Travel alerts like the well-publicized international heads-up we had last week - which warned of possible attacks in several European countries, in public places, at tourist favorites, on public transport and so on - are so vague as to be meaningless. We were told to be alert. Always good advice in a stressful modern world, but alert to what specific danger? No answer. That rachets up the stress even more, while not telling anyone what do do about stress.

Staying home is not an option - at least not for me, and not often.

Everyone has to assess their own tolerance for risk, to be sure. One way to do that is to check out the U.S. State Department's travel warnings and advisories and then decide how literally and seriously to take them. Another is simply to pay close attention to the news: online, on paper, on TV and radio - and especially to conversations with people who have recently been where you are thinking of going.

Common sense, no? Yes, and more likely to be helpful than well-intentioned but often-useless government proclamations.