Bilbao is a municipality and city in Spain, a major city in the province of Biscay in the autonomous community of the Basque Country and the tenth largest in Spain, with a population of 353,187 in 2010. Bilbao is situated in the north-central part of Spain, some 16 kilometres south of the Bay of Biscay, where the economic social development is located, where the estuary of Bilbao is formed.

After its foundation in the early 14th century by Diego López de Haro, head of the powerful Haro family, Bilbao was a commercial hub of the Basque Country that enjoyed significant importance in Green Spain. This was due to its port activity based on the export of iron extracted from the Biscayan quarries. Throughout the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Bilbao experienced heavy industrialisation, making it the centre of the second-most industrialised region of Spain, behind Barcelona. After the dramatic industrial crisis of the 1980s, Bilbao was forced to rethink its very economic foundations. That is how it transformed into a successful service town. Nowadays, Bilbao is a vigorous service city that is experiencing an ongoing social, economic, and aesthetic revitalisation process, started by the iconic Bilbao Guggenheim Museum.

The Basque Country (Euskadi in Basque Language) (País Vasco in Spanish) is an autonomous community of northern Spain. It includes the Basque provinces of Álava, Biscay and Gipuzkoa. The term Basque Country may also refer to the larger cultural region (Basque: Euskal Herria), the home of the Basque people, which includes the autonomous community, Navarre and part of the south of France. The Basque Autonomous Community ranks first in Spain in terms of per capita income, with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita being 40% higher than that of the European Union and 33.8% higher than Spain's average in 2010.

Through centuries of storytelling, the Basques have evolved a rich and colourful mythology. Basque folklore also encompasses various rituals and dances. The Basque language, also known as Euskera, is Europe's oldest living language. It is unrelated to Spanish, French, or any other Romance language and belongs to no other known language family. It was the universal language of rural Basques until the end of the nineteenth century. It is spoken today by 25%-30% of the region's population.

One of the most iconic paintings of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s, “Guernica,” depicts the slaughter of the undefended citizens of Guernica in the Basque province of Vizcaya.