We'll go to Guernica to party

Activists from the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform, who have just won a historic victory against the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, notably

Shortly after our recent investigation into the "mega greenwashing" of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and its patrons, the museum's board of directors has just announced, after 17 years of legal proceedings and environmental protests, the abandonment of an expansion project that would have jeopardized a precious biosphere reserve. On February 7, 2026, at the call of the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform, activists, residents, scientists, and wetland defenders will celebrate this historic victory: a popular festival against concrete, a joyfully irreverent carnival aimed at public authorities and major sponsors alike, and a signal sent far beyond the Basque Country to all those who refuse to see culture used as a Trojan horse for the destruction of life.

Mark your calendars: February 7, 2026, is going to be a hell of a party in Guernica, in the Spanish Basque Country, as everyone knows. There's a victory to celebrate, and victories don't come around every day. A truly momentous victory, one that will be etched in the annals of Wikipedia: the victory of the Zapatista army of wetland protectors against the wealthy foot soldiers, armed with powerful marketing tools, of the colonial empire of the contemporary art business. And without claiming more credit than necessary, we've still thrown our two cents of journalistic weight into the battlefield.

On May 25, the alarm was already raised: " Under the guise of cultural influence, a project to extend the Guggenheim in the Spanish Basque Country threatens one of the most precious ecosystems in Europe. Biosphere reserve, protected wetland, sanctuary for migratory birds: all this could give way to the bulldozers of an art that has become an economic showcase ".

Urdaibai Natural Area and Biosphere Reserve. Photo by Roberto Martínez (Flickr)

We recounted how the Urdaibai estuary, including its delta, which harbors exceptional biodiversity and serves as a vital stopover for migratory birds, despite being classified as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, a Ramsar site, and a Natura 2000 area, was at serious risk of being impacted by a proposed expansion of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, with two new museum branches in Guernica and Murueta, linked by a footpath. We also described how this project, initiated in 2008 and revived in 2020, was generating strong local opposition (through the "Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop" platform) and international opposition, culminating in an advocacy campaign by the Mediterranean Alliance for Wetlands with UNESCO. Environmentalists denounced a destructive overtourism project, emblematic of a globalized "McGuggenheim", but the Guggenheim Foundation, now chaired by American billionaire J. Tomilson Hill, a specialist in mergers and acquisitions and hedge funds, would not listen.

Billionaire J. Tomilson Hill, president of the Guggenheim Foundation, in his New York apartment. Photo Ryan Shorosky / Christie's.

Alone among the entire French, and even European, press, we recently labeled the "Arts of the Earth" exhibition, which had just opened at the Guggenheim in Bilbao, as "mega greenwashing." At Humanities , in fact, it's not really our style to mistake appearances for reality: "In Bilbao, with enormous marketing resources, the Guggenheim Museum is opening a vast 'Arts of the Earth' exhibition, celebrating soils, organic materials, and ecological imagination. Just a few dozen kilometers away, however, the same foundation is pursuing an expansion project in the heart of the Urdaibai estuary, a UNESCO biosphere reserve and protected wetland, denounced by environmentalists as a major threat to biodiversity. In other words: art drapes itself in the colors of life, while preparing the bulldozers" (HERE).

In that same article, we highlighted the exhibition's "sponsor": Iberdrola, the Spanish energy giant presented as a "world leader in renewables," but whose portfolio still relies heavily on gas-fired power plants and a mega-infrastructure model. In the Spanish Basque Country, no one has forgotten that Iberdrola succeeded Iberduero in 1992, which had begun construction of a nuclear power plant in Lemóniz (Biscay), on the Basque coast; the project was abandoned in the 1980s under the combined pressure of environmental movements, a part of Basque society and political violence (ETA attacks), leaving an industrial wasteland that has become a lasting trauma in Spanish energy history.

It was becoming too much. The verdict has finally come down: there will be no Guggenheim Urdaibai. After years of wrangling, the Patronato of the Bilbao museum decided on December 16th not to pursue the expansion project in the heart of the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, citing "technical unviability in the short and medium term" in the face of a mountain of environmental, urban planning, administrative, and legal obstacles. This about-face comes at the end of a "listening process" conducted in the region, the 950 accounts of which clearly revealed a majority opposed to the museum, but in favor of an alternative development model for the Busturialdea region (1) : in October 2024, thousands of people marched in Gernika (Guernica, in Basque) to say "no to the Guggenheim, yes to the future of the region."

To try and push the project through, the authorities had initiated a series of exemptions: lowering the coastal protection zone from 100 to 20 meters in Murueta, modifying urban planning regulations, demolishing a former factory and removing asbestos from the site, and promising 700 jobs and €39 million in annual economic benefits. But the legal challenges filed, particularly against the reduction of coastal protection, the need to compensate the shipyard, decontaminate the soil, and restore the wetlands, ultimately transformed the anticipated "cultural icon" into a political and legal quagmire that will persist for over a decade.

In March 2025, the president of the Basque government, Imanol Pradales (in the foreground), visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

to assure the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation of its support for the Guggenheim Museum expansion project in Urdaibai.

What happened to cause the Guggenheim Foundation to ultimately abandon a project it had, until recently, been determined to pursue? The Bilbao museum is based on a Basque public-private partnership. Its board of directors (Patronato), chaired by the Lehendakari (President of the Basque Government), is composed of three "founding patrons": the Basque Government, the Diputación Foral de Bizkaia (Province of Biscay), and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In addition, there are "non-founding patrons": some fifteen to twenty large companies and financial entities (banks, industrial groups, telecommunications, energy, etc.), but political influence is considerable. After initially dismissing the citizen mobilization and its arguments, based on the supposed "lever for economic development" of the Guggenheim project, the current president of the Basque government, Imanol Pradales, has gradually softened his stance. The scale of the local protests played a significant role in this shift.

The German artist and baroness Hilla von Rebay, "muse" and wife of Solomon R. Guggenheim

But it is possible that dissent has taken root within the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation itself. Now controlled by financiers and businessmen, it bears little resemblance to its original spirit, when Solomon R. Guggenheim, from a mining family and a lover of ancient art, decided to dedicate himself to abstract art, which he perceived as possessing a spiritual and utopian dimension. He began exhibiting his acquisitions in his Plaza apartment before opening the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, the first showcase for a collection entirely devoted to non-figurative art. History is unfair, however, because only his name has become the "brand" affixed to the facades of museums that, from New York, have spread throughout the world; for his wife, the German artist and Baroness Hilla von Rebay, played a more than decisive role.

Settling in New York in the late 1920s, she met Solomon R. Guggenheim and became his artistic advisor, confidante, and the true architect of his collection of non-objective art (Kandinsky, Bauer, Klee, etc.). It was she who encouraged Guggenheim to create the foundation dedicated to this art in 1937, and then to open the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in 1939, which she directed until 1952. She played a decisive role in the commission given to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 to design a "temple" of abstract art: the future rotunda of the Guggenheim on Fifth Avenue is largely the product of her vision. After the death of Solomon R. Guggenheim (1949), the family and the new leadership marginalized her; She was ousted from the management, then practically erased from the official history of the museum, to the point of not being invited to the inauguration of the building in 1959. Long forgotten, she has been rehabilitated since the 2000s as a major figure, both an artist and a "curatorial genius", without whom the Guggenheim would have neither its founding collection nor its iconic building.

Did the ghost of Hilla von Rebay, having read certain articles about the Guggenheim Bilbao project, particularly the recent one on les humanités, surreptitiously attend a Guggenheim Foundation board meeting, expressing her displeasure by threatening to overturn the board? We lack precise sources to state this with certainty, but the hypothesis is not unwelcome; for once, journalism might actually be useful...

Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop Platform.pdf

Download PDF • 378KB

Press release (in English) from the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop Platform.

In any case, the collectives, including the Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform, are now calling it a historic victory for Urdaibai, "one of the most important wetlands in Europe," and a precedent against large-scale cultural projects touted as levers for green development (see video HERE). While Basque institutions promise to "rethink" the future of the region, local movements remind us that the urgent task is not to replace one mega-museum with another iconic landmark, but to build, with the residents, a model based on wetland restoration, agroecology, slow tourism, and ecological commons. So, a celebration is planned for February 7th. We'll report from Guernica...

Jean-Marc Adolphe

(1). Busturialdea is a coastal comarca in Biscay, in the Spanish Basque Country, which largely corresponds to the territory of the Urdaibai biosphere reserve. It covers approximately 280 km² and comprises about twenty municipalities, the two main urban and administrative centers of which are Bermeo and Gernika-Lumo.

Inheriting from the former merindad of Busturia, the comarca combines fishing ports (Bermeo, Mundaka), small industrial or service towns (Gernika-Lumo, Murueta, Forua), and a mosaic of rural villages nestled against the marshes, hills, and forests of Urdaibai. It has around 46,000 inhabitants, with an aging population and a fragile economic structure (limited employment, declining industrial activity), which fuels debates on a development model that reconciles socio-economic revitalization with the preservation of one of the most important wetland complexes in the Basque Country.

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