Calle Tendería is one of those streets where old Bilbao rises up from the stones under your feet. It belongs to the original “Seven Streets” — Zazpikaleak — the narrow lanes where the city first took shape. Its name comes from tenderos, the shopkeepers and craftsmen who once filled this area. In medieval times the street was a tight, noisy strip: workshops on the ground floors, flats above them, fabrics hanging from windows, and the air thick with the smells of bread, leather, and sea salt. You could buy anything here — candles, spices, tools — and with every purchase came a whisper of news from ships arriving from faraway ports.
But Tendería has another layer, quieter and almost spiritual. One of the routes of the Camino de Santiago passed through this street on its way west. A scallop shell set into the pavement and a wooden figure of a pilgrim near the entrance still remind visitors of that ancient movement of people — tired, hopeful, walking toward something greater than themselves.
The story of Saint James, whose shrine the Camino leads to, goes back to the earliest days of Christian Europe. After the death of Christ, James traveled to the far reaches of Iberia to preach. Returning to Jerusalem, he was martyred, and according to legend, his followers placed his body in a boat without oars. Guided only by divine will, it drifted all the way to Galicia. Seven centuries later, a cluster of shining lights appeared above his forgotten grave — a sign that revealed the place that would become Santiago de Compostela, the “field of the star.”
When the boat reached the shore, the apostle’s body was said to be covered in scallop shells. Since then, the vieira has become the symbol of the saint and of the journey. And the meaning runs deeper: the grooves of the shell converge at one point, like the roads of Europe leading toward a single purpose — clarity, renewal, truth.
In medieval times, pilgrims who reached Santiago often continued farther west to Cape Finisterre — the edge of the known world — to wash in the ocean and take a scallop shell home as proof that the path was complete.
Tendería holds both of these worlds at once — the earthly and the spiritual. Among the smell of fresh bread and the clink of glasses, you can still feel the breath of the old city and the distant echo of the pilgrim road stretching far to the west, toward the ocean and the stars.
This walk is not just a stroll through the old streets of Bilbao — it’s a walk through the city’s memory. Everything here lies close together: the Gothic gates of Santiago Cathedral, the soft murmur of the “Dog Fountain,” the old plaques still marked by the great flood of 1983, and Bar Xukela, where the spirit of the city lives in a glass of wine and laughter at the counter.
We follow Calle del Perro and Calle de la Torre — streets whose names hold legends and the echoes of ancient family towers. At every turn, a story appears: about the Basques, whose defensive towers once stood like the stone houses of Svaneti; about Diego María Gardoki, the first Basque to serve as Spain’s ambassador to the United States; about Pedro Arrupe, the Basque priest who renewed the Jesuit order in the twentieth century.
Our path leads to the river where ships once lined the shore, and finally to El Arenal — the park where Bilbao learned to breathe, to love, and to listen to the quiet rhythm of its own heart.
This walk is like a simple, honest conversation with the city — no guide, no performance, just a friend who has a story waiting behind every corner.
