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Few buildings have changed a city's fortunes as dramatically as the Guggenheim Bilbao. When Frank Gehry's titanium-clad structure opened in 1997 on the banks of the Nervión, it did not merely give the city a landmark; it rewrote the economic and cultural story of an industrial port that had spent decades reinventing itself after the decline of its shipyards and steelworks. That phenomenon, now studied in urban planning circles as the Bilbao Effect, is visible everywhere you walk: in the regenerated waterfront, in the Abandoibarra district where cranes once stood, and in the confidence of a city that knows exactly what it has become.

The Guggenheim remains the gravitational centre of any first visit, and rightly so. A guided tour that pairs the architecture with Gehry's own design philosophy, combined with admission to the collection inside, gives the building the attention it deserves on both counts. Jeff Koons's floral Puppy guards the entrance; Richard Serra's vast steel corridors occupy the ground floor; and the building's exterior shifts colour with the Basque light, which is softer and more changeable than the light of southern Spain. The Nervión itself, once heavily polluted, is now clean enough to reflect the museum's curves on a still morning.