Swamp Goog
You would recognize Puppy, the floral Jeff Koons topiary in front of the Bilbao Guggenheim, and Maman, the giant Louise Bourgeois spider on the riverside, even if you don’t know where Bilbao is. Frank Gehry’s more ship-than-ship Guggenheim brought so much tourism cash and notoriety to post-industrial Bilbao that provincial officials want to replicate it—or complement it, they say—in a bog just 25 miles away.
Flippancy doesn’t cut the eye-twitching surprise of learning that a globally known art museum will be built within a UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve. Covering an area a bit smaller than Boston, the Urdaibai estuary is in the Oca River basin of Bizkaia, the westernmost province of the Basque Autonomous Community in the northern Spanish state; it is centered around a salt marsh and surrounded by steep cliffs. It is the only reserve of its kind in the Basque Country and it gives migratory birds a place to eat and rest between the unyielding Bay of Biscay and the Pyrenees, making it an important stop for spoonbills, cranes, whiskered terns, and other birds traveling along the East Atlantic Flyway. The Urdaibai reserve’s main tourism draw is its Bird Center, a nature observatory and research base run by the non-profit Aranzadi science collective just east of the proposed museum location. About 40,000 people visit each year, many of them with school field trip groups.
Building a Guggenheim in the Urdaibai wetland was first proposed in 2008, and it was shelved when the austerity following that period’s economic crisis mothballed all the construction plans for years. It re-surfaced in 2021 as part of a post-COVID recovery plan. The entrance to the Urdaibai Guggenheim would be built over a defunct cutlery factory in Gernika (the one in the Picasso painting) at the edge of the Urdaibai biosphere and would host researchers, and an extant path would lead to a new exhibition space just south of there, at a Murueta shipyard that is either totally abandoned or still in use, depending on who you ask. The number of annual visitors would be limited, and they could only get to the exhibition space by walking the path, riding a bike, or taking an official tram.
When you first read about it the Guggenheim Urdaibai sounds like a caprice that emerged from a municipal brainstorming confab. The men with always-recent haircuts and polished shoes and the women with smoke-aged faces and bleached bangs in pointy heels would have been sitting in a conference room at a table dotted with tiny cups of coffee. Their pleasantries would have teeth only to them and would seem to be interminable at an hour when most people would be dying to eat already but of course it is a mid-day meeting that started late, and they lunch on the acid cardoons of two-faced bonhomie. They frequently say things like dynamization and hacer hincapié and they are sure they are going to make their names by securing those national austerity-then European COVID recovery funds for their town. It’ll be the next miracle in Bilbao, I’ll take charge, I know someone who knows someone who can check if Frank Gehry is free, the sort of scheme that by and large never gets aired outside an agenda printed out for a dozen people.
Even so, the project could actually happen. The regulatory body that oversees the coast was asked to change, and ultimately did change, the legal building margin, reducing the unbuildable wetlands margin from 100 to 20 meters, so building would be permitted at the Murueta site. Funding for the requisite land restoration has been earmarked. The path to the fen has been paved on paper, sort of.
Having been in the planning stage for so long, the project has inspired manifold debates. The Urdaibai Guggenheim will be a unique laboratory for immersion in art and nature. It will provide much-needed resources to the area, one of the most economically depressed in the Basque Country. It will endanger migratory birds; it will not—because the tourism will be so controlled and careful—it will be built on already-industrialized land, which will first be restored and then built upon again.
Project opponents contend it will usher in mass tourism, with its buildup of high-rent lodging and fancy destination restaurants, to a fragile area that is unable to provide for its own infrastructural needs and must truck in drinking water from elsewhere; the area’s tourism limit has reportedly already been exceeded. The investments in the museum will lift area boats from their underdeveloped depths and fund the ecological restoration of the shipyard—but the “investment” to date is all appropriated public funds, and by law, the private owners of the shipyard are on the hook to pay for the restoration. As the centerpiece project, the Urdaibai Guggenheim has dominated all regional development plans for more than 15 years and is holding up progress of any other project that might cross its path.
Throughout, critics have denounced the Urdaibai Guggenheim planners for lacking in transparency and for imposing the project without citizen input, for serving the needs of a New York foundation rather than those of local residents. Every public statement complains of vagueness: of no detailed environmental impacts, of no accounting for full costs. Political analyst Ramón Zallo has written that the project phases are even organized in a way that avoids as many environmental risk assessments as possible.
In response, the Basque government and the provincial council agreed to a listening tour and analysis by Columbia University and the Agirre Lehendakari Center, which is basically a social science think tank, to collect the opinions of 1000 stakeholders. The decision to advance the project or not was postponed, in principle, in order to complete the listening tour in 2025. The findings will purportedly inform the final decision, at an unspecified time in 2026, of whether or not to build.
Opponents of the project include Urdaibai Guggenheim STOP, a public campaign that holds protest events; Zain Dezagun Urdaibai (Let’s Take Care of Urdaibai), a public advocacy group since 1992, has also registered its objection. Hundreds of ecologists and other researchers, including a veteran forest ranger stationed in Urdaibai, have signed a petition asking for the development to be scrapped. Zain Dezagun and UG STOP have hand-delivered letters to the director of the Guggenheim Museum and Foundation in New York to ask it to cut ties to the Urdaibai project.
The results of the listening tour so far are not uniformly opposed to the project, with small business owners wanting increased foot traffic and such, but most respondents so far have concerns about the vagueness of the plans outlined to the public, the lack of budget, and the dismissive invocation of art immersion in response to questions about migratory birds.
Even with its so-crazy-maybe sensibility, the Urdaibai Guggenheim sounds like a sheep-inflected Carl Hiaasen fever dream, and yet it hasn’t gone away over the course of successive economic crises and administrations, and so it seems reasonable to ask why. In the Basque Country all politics are proxies and it’s not always obvious for what (Basque independence or the appropriate relationship of the state to Catholicism, hard to say), but the relatively conservative party (equivalent to the U.S. Democrats, as I was told years ago) PNV has championed the project while the left-wing party EH Bildu is against it, as are the other parties with substantial presence in the area, including the socialist party PSE. The Basque water authority and the Spanish coastal authority, which have distinct orientations and purposes, have both expressed reservations about the proposed museum sites. Maybe the real story is mundane in its venality, as explored by the journalist Ahoztar Zelaieta, with PNV officials from more than one generation of the same family in Murueta standing to benefit financially from the Urdaibai project, etc. et al.
Whatever the explanation for the staying power of this proposal—the notional aesthetic? The international prestige value, the petty municipal cashmongering? There are some fairly substantial questions that never do get addressed in any of these discussions. What are the actual projected environmental impacts of building an art museum over the old shipyard in this wetland (what will happen to birb)? What is the business case for this museum—is anyone going to go there? There was supposed to be an exploratory study with interviews of potential museumgoers in 2009, but it was either not done or not mentioned again. Bilbao is a big city with an international airport and Urdaibai might just be far enough away, by Euro standards, to not be worth bothering about.
People go to art museums when they tour cities—there’s an abstract appeal to the thought of watching spoonbills in a wetland from the deck of a museum full of Brancusis—but will it actually work, and should it?