Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Negotiations between the Basque authorities and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation opened in February 1991, the foundation's director Thomas Krens having set out to plant European art centres in Berlin and Bilbao. The Basque Government proposed the city's decrepit port area, once Bilbao's main source of income, and agreed to cover the US$100 million construction cost, a $50 million acquisitions fund, a one-time $20 million fee and a $12 million annual budget; in exchange the foundation would manage the institution and rotate parts of its permanent collection through Bilbao.

A competition held in 1991 for purely legal reasons ran ten days, between Frank Gehry, Arata Isozaki and Coop Himmelb(l)au. Gehry won, and the intended conversion of the old municipal Alhondiga warehouse gave way to a new building on a site he and Krens chose beside the Nervion. The collaboration agreement followed in 1994.

Construction ran from 1992 to 1997, the contractor Ferrovial building the museum for $89 million. The estuary's clay bed required 665 pilings. The base was faced in beige limestone from the Huescar quarries near Granada, the curved volumes clad in 33,000 titanium scales quilted rather than undulated to resist the wind.

From the autumn of 1993 Gehry's office digitised his hand-built models in Dassault Systemes' CATIA software, a method Rick Smith had brought from the Walt Disney Concert Hall work. Paul Goldberger relayed others' judgement that Bilbao "could not have been constructed without CATIA". The building was finished on time and on budget.

On 13 October two ETA militants shot dead a Basque policeman who interrupted their attempt to set up grenade launchers to attack the opening. About 5,000 Bilbao residents attended an outdoor light show and concerts the night before. King Juan Carlos I opened the museum on 18 October 1997 with "The Guggenheim Museums and the Art of This Century", a 300-piece overview of twentieth-century art from Cubism to new media, though some accounts put the opening display at 250 works. Most pieces came from the foundation's permanent collection, but the museum also acquired paintings by Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still and commissioned work from Francesco Clemente, Anselm Kiefer, Jenny Holzer and Richard Serra.

The largest gallery was renamed the Arcelor Gallery in 2005 for the steel manufacturer that sponsored the project, and that year housed Richard Serra's The Matter of Time, the weathering-steel series that is the collection's only permanent exhibit; it incorporates Serra's earlier 100 m Snake, and Robert Hughes called it "courageous and sublime". David Hockney's exhibition drew over 290,000 visitors in 2012.

The term "Bilbao effect", for the way the museum changed the city, is also used by critics who denounce it as a symbol of gentrification and cultural imperialism, and The Wall Street Journal suggested calling it the Bilbao anomaly instead. Brian O'Doherty, positive about approaching the building, judged most of its interior spaces "too vast", with works by Braque, Picasso and Rodchenko looking "absurd" on its walls.

The building and the permanent collection belong to the Basque authorities, who provided the land and the money for the works; the museum uses the Guggenheim name under a renewable franchise-like arrangement, and is managed by the New York foundation. On 3 December 2014 its board approved another twenty years of the collaboration first signed in 1994.

A 2007 report by the Basque Court of Auditors found the museum had paid more than $27 million for art between 2002 and 2005. After a further audit in 2008 revealed money missing from accounts, the foundation filed a case against its director, Roberto Cearsolo Barrenetxea, "for financial and accounting irregularities", stating that he had admitted diverting money into his own account since 1998 from the two companies managing the building and its collection. In 2021-22 the museum's eighteen cleaners, most of them women, struck for nine months until they won pay rises and full-time contracts.

An expansion floated in 2008, of 5,000 m2 in the Urdaibai estuary, a UNESCO biosphere reserve, reached the point of the Biscay government putting forward EUR 40 million by 2022. Following opposition from local people and from Greenpeace, SEO/BirdLife and WWF, the foundation announced in December 2025 that the project had been abandoned because of "territorial, urban planning and environmental constraints and limitations".