Bizkaia – Bizkaia and the Guggenheim effect

A year on from the Basque separatists' ceasefire and the region is booming, led by Bizkaia, largest of the three Basque provinces. Its capital city, Bilbao, is upgrading its infrastructure to cope with the huge numbers of visitors to the new Guggenheim Museum. It's attracting international banks and technology companies, partly thanks to favourable tax rates. But Madrid is contesting these. Meanwhile ETA extremists remain a threat. Jules Stewart reports.

Bizkaia is one of the three provinces that were united as Euskadi, the Basque Autonomous Region, under the 1978 constitution that decentralized Spain’s political administration after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco. It accounts for more than half of the Basque region’s GDP and although its economy is now mainly service-based, more than a third of output still comes from industry. However, Bizkaia’s GDP is forecast to grow by 4% this year compared with 3.7%

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