Guggenheim scraps Basque Country expansion plan after local protests

Environmental groups and local campaigners in the Basque Country have welcomed the scrapping of a project to build an outpost of Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum on a Unesco biosphere reserve that is a vital habitat for local wildlife and migrating birds.

The scheme’s backers, which include the Guggenheim Foundation, the Basque government and local and regional authorities, had claimed the museum’s twin sites – one in the Basque town of Guernica and one in the nearby Urdaibai reserve – would help revitalise the area, attract investment and create jobs.

But opponents said the scheme was being pushed through without proper consultation and would wreck Urdaibai, a 22,068-hectare site that was declared a biosphere reserve by Unesco in 1984.

An aerial view of the Urdaibai reserve. Photograph: Markel Redondo for the Guardian

In a statement earlier this week, the foundation announced that the project had been abandoned “in light of the territorial, urban planning and environmental constraints and limitations”.

It added: “New alternatives will be explored in order to face the challenge of elaborating a proposal that responds to the museum’s objective of growing in order to remain a leading cultural institution internationally and a driving force in the Basque Country’s cultural, economic and social scene.”

The Bilbao museum, which opened in 1997 despite considerable opposition, is credited with helping to reverse the city’s post-industrial decline and put it on the tourist map. But local people and ecologists argued that Urdaibai’s cliffs and estuarine salt marshes were hardly comparable with the polluted, urban site on which the Guggenheim was built.

Campaign groups and environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace, WWF, Ecologists in Action, Friends of the Earth and SEO/BirdLife, had called for the project to be scrapped. News of the foundation’s decision was received enthusiastically.

The Guggenheim Urdaibai Stop platform said in a statement: “The authorities told us unanimously that they were going to build this museum ‘no matter what’.

“They didn’t care about the opinion of society; they didn’t care about the debate generated among citizens. Now, however, we are here celebrating the decision that these same leaders and institutions have had to make, unable to ignore a reality revealed by science, the law and society.”

SEO/BirdLife said “citizen mobilisation” had been key to saving “this threatened natural heritage”, while Greenpeace Spain said: “Social mobilisation works and, together with countless local groups, we have managed to stop the extension of the Guggenheim Museum that threatened to destroy this unique natural space. Urdaibai is already a monument and it will continue to be one.”