When you pick up old cufflinks or a carved pipe stand, it feels as if you’re holding a small fragment of a world that has disappeared. They once belonged to a culture of precision and dignity — objects that signaled status, taste, and a certain discipline of life. Cufflinks first appeared in seventeenth-century France and, by the nineteenth century, had become an essential part of a gentleman’s wardrobe. Their material and design revealed a lot about a man — his wealth, his habits, even his character. Their golden age came in the first half of the twentieth century, when they expressed confidence and professional success. Then shirts with buttons took over, and cufflinks almost vanished.
In Bilbao, these items became popular during the same period when the city was evolving from a port into one of Spain’s major industrial centers. Shipyards, steel factories, banks — all of it created a new class of engineers, businessmen, and financiers. Their offices displayed pipe stands; their cuffs shone with metal links; their walls carried maps of trade routes. These objects represented a belief in order, discipline, and progress — the values of a rising bourgeois Bilbao convinced of its future.
But alongside this elegance grew a quiet sense of distance. For workers and ordinary Basques, such objects didn’t represent refinement; they reminded people of a world that was not theirs. As Madrid tightened control and reduced Basque autonomy, the city’s economic success looked less like prosperity and more like a polished façade hiding cultural pressure. So in the 1930s, when the independence movement gained strength, the struggle was not only about land and language — it was also against that bourgeois lifestyle, where style seemed to replace freedom.
After the Franco era, most of that world faded. What survived now rests on market tables, like those in Plaza Nueva. Among seashells, wooden figures, and old books lie cufflinks and pipe stands — no longer symbols of power, only reminders. And in a way, that feels fair: objects that once divided people have become part of a shared past. Today they are simply things, markers of a time when even luxury could be a kind of protest, and simplicity a quiet form of dignity.
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.
