Vinyl records at the Sunday market on Plaza Nueva are more than music — they’re a living piece of the city’s memory. Back when Bilbao was booming as an industrial powerhouse, almost every home had a record player, and the warm crackle of vinyl meant comfort, modernity, and a small window to the wider world. Records were sold in music shops under these very arcades, and in the same buildings where collectors now flip through covers they first saw as teenagers.
Vinyl reached Spain in the 1950s, but it was the 1970s that shaped a whole generation through sound. Here in the north, radios picked up not only Madrid but also France, and young people mixed Beatles, Bowie, and Basque Rock into a new musical identity — global and local at once, rebellious and poetic. That mix still defines the way Bilbao hears itself.
Today these records aren’t just items for sale; they’re artifacts of a time when music was carved into physical grooves — warm, imperfect, alive. And like everything in Bilbao, vinyl also carries the city’s spirit of resistance. During the years of censorship, songs in Basque played quietly in bars and living rooms — soft, but stubborn. It was freedom set to melody, something no government could silence.
So now, among old books and between Disney albums and records by Miguel Bosé, you find discs from local 1970s bands. It’s not nostalgia — it’s continuity. Under the stone columns of Plaza Nueva, the sound of vinyl brings back a time when every song was an event, not background noise. A time when people listened to music the way they spoke with one another — attentively, thoughtfully, with their whole heart.
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.
