Bilbao
Basque Country / Biscay (Bizkaia)
Bilbao is Spain's most improbable comeback — a working port and steel town on a bend of the Nervion that spent a century as one of Europe's grimiest industrial engines, watched its shipyards and blast furnaces collapse in the 1970s and 80s, and then in 1997 opened a Frank Gehry titanium fish on a former dockyard and reinvented itself as a design capital.