{{ bilbao }}

Semana Grande, Spanish for Big Week, is Bilbao's main festival that starts on the 3rd Saturday in the month of August, lasting 9 days. Bilbao, 14 km south of Bay of Biscay, is the largest city of the Basque Country.

We were there for two days, arriving on the 1st day of the festival!

The architecture in Bilbao is a little mixed. I found it a bit strange to find modern looking buildings sitting on one side of the street and classical style buildings on the other.

There it is again! Garbage bins out on the streets...

I quite like this. There is one single tree planted right in front of a police station.

Booths are set up for the festival...

Churro stands...

A walker that I am, I once again dragged my brother into touring the city on foot for hours... The downtown area is surrounded by two mountain ranges with an average elevation of 400 metres. Within the urban area, there are steep hills. And when I see hills, I want to go up on those hills...

This walkway on the right brings you to an elevator, which takes you down to street level at just less than 1 euro per person. I'm not sure how many metres above it is but from the photo, you can see how high up it is.

These condos look pretty fancy...

This is quite an awesome looking pedestrian bridge. The walkway is actually see-through, but because they've had some accidents with that, now the walkway is mostly covered with carpet.

Gehry's famous Guggenheim...

Its more overwhelming to see it in person...

Festival parade...

they were extremely efficient at cleaning the streets....