Experience San Mamés Stadium

Athletic Club don't do football like anyone else. Since 1912 they've fielded only players born or footballing-raised in the greater Basque Country - Bizkaia, Gipuzkoa, Álava, Navarre and the three French Basque provinces over the Pyrenees. They're the only side to have never been relegated from La Liga, and they've done it all from a homegrown cantera ("with home-grown talent and local support, there's no need for imports" runs the club motto). Romantic, defiant, faintly mad - and brilliant when it clicks.

The original San Mamés stood on this spot from 1913 and was christened La Catedral for the quality of football worshipped inside. Its replacement, opened in stages between 2013 and 2014 and designed by Bilbao firm IDOM, sits a few metres from where the old ground died. 53,331 seats, a UEFA Category 4 elite rating, and a façade - La Vela, "the sail" - wrapped in more than 2,700 ETFE perforated louvres that glow red and white at night and turn the whole structure into the city's second great architectural set piece after the Guggenheim.

Inside, the noise is bottled up by the steepest stands in Spain. Pre-kickoff brings the txalaparta - an ancient Basque percussion instrument hammered out wooden plank by wooden plank - followed by the club anthem belted by 50,000 voices, and at full-time the unaccompanied Basque folk song Txoria Txori ("The Bird is a Bird") drifts down from the stands like a hymn.

The current era belongs to the Williams brothers - Iñaki, the captain and Ghanaian-born iron man, and Nico, the dribbling winger who turned down Barcelona in summer 2025 to sign a ten-year deal through 2035. Add a 2024 Copa del Rey (ending a 40-year trophy drought) and a return to the Champions League in 2025/26, and the Cathedral has rarely felt holier. Ernesto Valverde is in his final season at the helm before Edin Terzic takes over.

Bilbao spent the late 20th century as a soot-blackened industrial port and the early 21st reinventing itself as one of Europe's great urban regeneration stories. Frank Gehry's titanium-clad Guggenheim landed in 1997 and the rest of the city - riverbanks, metro, old shipyards - pulled itself upright behind it.

Walk the Nervión from the museum past Calatrava's white Zubizuri footbridge into the Casco Viejo, the medieval Seven Streets quarter where the Mercado de la Ribera trades fish above the water and the pintxos bars on Plaza Nueva fill up by 8pm. It's small, walkable, properly Basque, and very seriously into its food.

Metro Line 1 - The red line stops directly at San Mamés station and pops up under the south end of the ground. A single from Casco Viejo takes about eight minutes. Trains run every few minutes on matchdays and the platforms get fierce - let the locals through.

Euskotren tram - The Bilbao tram glides along the Nervión riverside; jump off at Pío Baroja and the stadium is a five-minute walk north. Slower than the metro but you get the river views and the post-match strolls back into town are lovely.

Airport bus A3247 - Bizkaibus's green A3247 runs from Bilbao Airport (BIO) every 20-30 minutes between 06:10 and 23:45, terminating at Bilbao Intermodal - basically next door to the stadium. Journey time about 25 minutes, around €3 paid on board.

On foot - From the Guggenheim it's a flat 20-minute riverside walk west along the Nervión. From Casco Viejo allow 35-40 minutes through the Ensanche, or hop the metro for the last leg.

Don't eat before the game. Calle Pozas and the parallel Calle García Rivero - a five-minute walk from the ground - become the matchday nerve centre of the city, with locals shoulder to shoulder from lunchtime. Hit Asador Indusi for béchamel-loose ham croquetas, Café Iruña a little further out for old-Bilbao tiled glamour, and any bar with a tray of Gildas on the counter: the classic Basque pintxo of guindilla pepper, anchovy and olive on a stick, invented down the road and named after Rita Hayworth's film. Wash it down with txakoli, the slightly fizzy Basque white poured from a great height into tumblers.

Learn three words. "Aupa Athletic!" (come on Athletic) gets nods of approval; "eskerrik asko" means thank you in Euskara. Catalan and Castilian play second fiddle here - this is Basque country and the signage, the songs and the half-time txalaparta all say so.

If you can swing tickets for the Basque Derby against Real Sociedad, take them. It's one of the most fiercely contested and weirdly civilised rivalries in European football - mutual respect runs deep and you'll see mixed-colour scarves in the same family.