Plan To Build Extension Of Bilbao Guggenheim In UNESCO World Heritage Biosphere Reserve Scrapped After Local Opposition
Environmental groups and local campaigners in the Basque Country have welcomed the scrapping of a project to build an outpost of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum on a Unesco biosphere reserve that is a vital habitat for local wildlife and migrating birds. The scheme’s backers, which include the Guggenheim Foundation, the Basque government and local and regional authorities, had claimed the museum’s twin sites – one in the Basque town of Guernica and one in the nearby Urdaibai reserve – would help revitalise the area, attract investment and create jobs.
But opponents said the scheme was being pushed through without proper consultation and would wreck Urdaibai, a 22,068-hectare site that was declared a biosphere reserve by Unesco in 1984. In a statement earlier this week, the foundation announced that the project had been abandoned “in light of the territorial, urban planning and environmental constraints and limitations”.
It added: “New alternatives will be explored in order to face the challenge of elaborating a proposal that responds to the museum’s objective of growing in order to remain a leading cultural institution internationally and a driving force in the Basque Country’s cultural, economic and social scene.”
The Bilbao museum, which opened in 1997 despite considerable opposition, is credited with helping to reverse the city’s post-industrial decline and put it on the tourist map. But local people and ecologists argued that Urdaibai’s cliffs and estuarine salt marshes were hardly comparable with the polluted, urban site on which the Guggenheim was built.
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/18/guggenheim-museum-scraps-basque-country-expansion-plan-after-local-protests