Hotel Melia, Bilbao, Spain

BILBAO - My home base during a recent visit to Bilbao - the biggest city in northern Spain's Basque Country - was the stylish Hotel Melia, a branch of Spain's Sol hotel chain. It's a fine central-city hotel, not quite as geared up to welcome international visitors as homegrown ones, but fine nonetheless.

You know how they say location, location, location is key to the success of brick and mortar businesses like hotels, yes? It's certainly key to the success of the Melia, comfortably located between compact, nice-to-look-at Dona Casilda Park and the Nervion River, which flows through the heart of Bilbao. Frank Gehry's brilliant Guggenheim Museum, the emblem of Bilbao since it opened in the 1990s, is a five to 10 minute walk away, depending on how often you stop to gaze at the high-quality sculptures along the riverside promenade and how long you linger. A modern, clean, swift and efficient public tram system runs right outside the hotel.

My room was on the ninth floor of the 10-story hotel - an angular, massive, modern building softened with glassy banks of windows. My room overlooked the park, which was bordered on the other side by a nondescript commercial district and beyond, in the middle distance, by rugged hills that shoulder onto the outskirts of town and help contain urban sprawl. The spacious terrace outside my room gave me a better look at the outdoors and was painted hot-pink.

My standard room had a so-so-size desk set up for Wi-Fi connections (which cost extra), a clean, mid-sized bathroom, a minibar, a good King-sized bed - in short, the amenities one would expect from a four-star business hotel, which is what the Melia is during the week. At night and on weekends, it becomes more of a social destination with a trendy bar that opens at 7:30 p.m.. One minus: There is no dedicated business center in the hotel. Rather, there are two PCs set up in the lobby at a raised desk at the entrance to the bar. Good luck if you want to work there late, unless of course you have a good deal of tolerance for noise. Newspapers can be delivered to your room for a fee, though I found none in English.

Aizian, the Melia's prime restaurant, is a good place to have breakfast, offering views of the park and a buffet. In summer, the restaurant spills out onto a terrace at the lip of the park, a well-kept greensward good for people-watching. Just down the road, toward the Guggenheim and its swooping titantium roofs, a highrise under construction takes shape, designed by 'starchitect' Cesar Pelli.

Indeed, this riverside area, which served as the main port of Bilbao until the mid-1980s - the port is now on the Atlantic at the river's mouth - is a brilliantly redeveloped central city. It is walkable, safe, clean and pretty, with several nearby bridges spanning the Nervion.
The Melia, located across the street from a large, engagingly designed (but not fully occupied) shopping mall, fits in seamlessly to this brightly renewed urban fabric.

Hotel Melia can be contacted by e-mail at melia.bilbao@solmelia.com, by telephone from outside Spain at 34 94 428 000, on the Web at http://www.melia-bilbao.com/.

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.