Urdabai is the little Basque Doñana. It is a natural joy that in 1984 UNESCO raised the category of biosphere reserve, the only one existing in the Basque Country. This paradise of Biscay is protected by a legal regime enshrined in a law of the Basque Parliament approved unanimously in 1989. In this privileged location located approximately 40 kilometers from Bilbao, the Guggenheim Bilbao is planned to expand with the construction of a museum with two headquarters, one in Gernika and the other in Murueta, connected by a path and a promenade of approximately six kilometers in total. The project has put a large part of the citizens on a war footing by environmentalists, who directly oppose the occupation of Urdaibai for the irreversible ecological damage that guarantees that these cultural installations will cause a unique ecosystem. The Guggenheim board will meet next March to decide whether to move forward on the museum project or on the carpet. “Barring any last-minute surprises,” they assure the sources of information on the process, “everything suggests that the project has been stopped.”
In Urdaibai, the defense of nature is about to finally impose itself on culture. The decision is in the hands of the Basque Government, the Delegation of Bizkaia and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the three founding entities that pushed the project, and the rest of the patron members. The enthusiasm and insistence with which PNV-led institutions defended Urdaibai’s Guggenheim is beginning to deflate. What was something “irreducible” a few months ago, it is now possible to resolve and this can lead to the gentle death of the Guggenheim landing in the Oka River.
Ramón Gezuraga, Murueta’s vecino, doesn’t give credit. Walk down to the estuary and ask for silence. At this moment, the song of birds was heard. “What do you think?” Gezuraga is one of many residents who directly object to the Guggenheim’s “invasive” claims. “If you want to transport the greatest natural heritage of Euskadi,” he adds. Social discontent is an outcry. The Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform has succeeded in channeling all citizen unrest. Eider Gotxi, on behalf of this association, highlights the strength of a movement that manages to curb political aspirations: “People are very unhappy. applazamiento. We will not accept it,” he says.
The Diputación de Bizkaia, still in the hands of the nationalists, was the main promoter of this operation. In 2008, it was proposed to establish another Guggenheim in Urdaibai, complementary to the titanium building opened in 1997 in the capital of Vizcaína. The chartered institution responded in 2021 with a project that aimed to combine environment and museum in the heart of the nature reserve. The original plan envisages locating in Gernika, in the former headquarters of cuberteria Dalia, the entrance to the museum project with a building of 2,500 square meters on a total land of 20,286 square meters, intended for educational and research activities. According to the memorandum published by Guggenheim, another building would be built in Murueta “fully integrated into the landscape, with exhibition galleries, temporal exhibitions and gastronomic spaces”, with a total area of 41,389 square meters, from which a building of 3,700 square meters would rise on land that currently occupies the Murueta distilleries, still in operation.
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The creation of a Guggenheim in Urdaibai would cost 130 million euros (figure without updating) and it is estimated that it could attract around 150,000 visitors per year, always following the axes of the project. “I am from Bermeo and I am very happy with the disaster that happened in Gaztelugatxe,” he says in reference to the idyllic island filled with visitors since it became the Rocadragón of Game of Thrones. “I don’t want this to happen again in Urdaibai,” Gotxi said. Citizen platforms and environmentalists fear that tourist mass growth will have “perverse” effects on protected wetlands and marshes.
Bizkaia did not stop its efforts to achieve its goal. At the end of 2022, when today he leaves Kari Imanol Pradales, responsible for infrastructure and territorial development, he saved 40 million to undertake the work. This dinner remains frozen, without being executed. Pradales, who in his oath as representative of Vasco received letters with the motto “Less Pradales and more humedales”, always defended the initiative and left to declare, in December 2024, that his desire was to preside over the inauguration of the Guggenheim of Urdaibai. Now keep quiet about it.
His predecessor, Iñigo Urkullu, announced at the end of 2023 (he had been relegated as a PNV candidate to lehendakari in favor of Pradales) that a two-year period was open to rethink the project. This period is now coming to an end. At the same time, the local government agreed to submit the project to a “listening”. This consultative work was led by the Agirre Lehendakaria Center (an entity created in 2013 by the Basque Public University in collaboration with Columbia University in New York) and its definitive conclusions are only known through the mediation of money, unless one knows the scope of the results. Gotxi, from the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop, assures that this listening process continues “to the minute” and that 80% of those consulted are against the project and only 8% support it. The others are among the undecided or those who prefer not to express themselves.
Social protest becomes fierce. Very few residents of the Busturialdea region are in favor of the idea of installing a museum in their greatest environmental treasure. The operation requires us to recalibrate the soil, modify the town planning plans of three municipalities, acquire the Murueta stills, decontaminate the soil and water… It must also save any possible opposition to justice. The National Audience is awaiting the resolution of the three appeals filed by numerous other associations against the ministerial decree which reduces the coastline protection service for stills from 100 to 20 meters.
All these inconveniences led the Vizcaína Diputación to modify its speech to justify its decision to consider a project that it describes as “strategic”. A spokesperson for the chartered institution (in the hands of the PNV), which does not support the position it will defend in the patronage of the museum on the 16th, recognizes the difficulties in following this path: “In these moments, we envisage a complicated scenario to determine that the project is viable in the short term”. The works that are not appropriate to continue the expansion of the museum in the middle of nature, according to the Diputación, are supported in the “complex urban planning process” of the environment, “the uncertainty of the judicial front” open in the national public and in the result of the listening process. The PNV of Biscay wanted to prepare the ground before a possible reversal: “There is important work,” declared this month its president, Iñigo Ansola. The Culture Council goes in the same direction and emphasizes that there are “difficulties and social tensions”, commented its president, Ibone Bengopetxea.
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The installation of the Guggenheim in this natural environment would require the cessation of the activity of the Murueta distilleries, whose activity is alive despite the fact that the concession which was granted to this company in 1943 has expired since 2018, as recognized in this newspaper by the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Return (Miteco), an active party in the museum project. The PNV, in exchange for its support for the inauguration of Pedro Sánchez, obtained in mid-2023 that the central government allocates 40 million euros for the environmental revitalization of Urdaibai. Ministry sources assured this newspaper that the concession “was extinguished” at this closing, even if the holder presented “a request to see if he has a current compensatory right”, which prevents him from deciding whether to withdraw from the premises he occupies. Citizen and environmentalist platforms claim that the Murueta shipyards “illegally invade a territory that belongs to the sea,” says Gotxi. “There is war. Its facilities have been expanded with ships and dikes that are part of the land maritime public domain,” the document says. And they’re bored because continuing the museum project means violating the broad conservation law which, textually, requires them to “protect the integrity and promote the recovery of the land, flora, fauna, landscape, water and atmosphere and, ultimately, of all its ecosystems from a natural, scientific, educational, cultural, recreational and socio-economic point of view.”
Amid all this noise, Miren Arzalluz took office at the start of 2025 at the head of Guggenheim Bilbao, replacing Juan Ignacio Vidarte. Agents of Basque culture (more than 1,000, according to the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform) signed a declaration against the project: “Not in my name”, the title reads. Representatives of the scientific community also spoke out against this measure. Around 400 researchers from 31 countries endorsed the project and signed a declaration demanding protection and restoration of the wetland. Aitor Galarza, doctor of biology and member of the team that carried out the study to declare Urdaibai a biosphere reserve, warns of the “enormous impact” that this would tend to cause an extension of the Bilbao Museum in this natural environment: “It is a miracle that Urdaibai is as we know it. We are destroying it. There is a lack of adequate management of the natural environment that the institutions (ZEPA) of Red Natura 2000 have abandoned, which would increase the impact on aquatic birds”. An installation like the one envisaged would lead to “increasing impacts and cause irreversible damage in the area”, he warns.
Can culture justify the destruction of nature? Fernando Valladares (researcher at CSIC), Jon Morant (biologist at the University of Alicante) and Carlos Javier Durá (doctor at Environmental Derecho), in a writing published in May of this year in The conversationthey are direct: “The answer, from the point of view of sustainability and intergenerational justice, is clear: no”.
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