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Paper short abstract:

This presentation is about understanding how Bilbao, a city by the estuary of the Nervión-Ibaizabal river, became the most important port town in the Basque Country from the Middle Ages due to its constant need to conquer and adapt such river.

Paper long abstract:

In 1300 Bilbao was officially establish as a harbour town. Before that time, people were using the river which suggests a variety of maritime activities (shipbuilding, trading…). Due to its location at the bottom of a valley, with middle height hills, the only way for Bilbao to grew was to reclaim parts of the river, adapting the waterfront, and enlarging downwards to the sea. This was done with a lot of effort, altering the course of the river, creating island which were later closed for enlarging the port space for loading and unloading goods and raw material. Archaeological work carried out in the recent years has allowed to record many of this events by joining the archaeological results, photographs, blueprints, painting and historical records. This allows to understand why the current port of Bilbao has been built at the mouth of the river, making it a superport on the sea.

Archaeology provide us with a window into the past to understand how a city develops through time. It is still surprising that a city so industrialized as Bilbao still have elements of its maritime activites: from jetties to bollards, from fishing weirs to docking areas, from cranes to remains of bargues in the intertidal zone.

This presentation will show our current work in an attempt to record all these features before the ongoing transformation of the waterfront in Bilbao destroy them. Should not be recorded properly, they will only be remembered in pictures.