Bilbao on a Monday: the Guggenheim is closed. Here is what is not.

You planned your trip around the Guggenheim. You arrive, and it’s Monday. The museum is shut.

It happens constantly, and almost nothing online prepares you for it. Search for Bilbao on a Monday and you’ll find a dozen pages telling you the museum is closed — and not one telling you what to do instead.

This is that page. We run a café five minutes from the old town, we’re open on Mondays, and we have this conversation with visitors most weeks.

First, the facts

The Guggenheim Museum closes on Mondays. It opens Tuesday to Sunday, 10am to 7pm.

There are exceptions worth knowing. It does open on Mondays from 15 June to 13 September, during Easter week, and on a handful of public-holiday Mondays. Outside those dates, a Monday visit isn’t happening.

Now the part nobody tells you. The Bilbao Fine Arts Museum is open on Mondays, 10am to 8pm. Its closing day is Tuesday, not Monday. It sits a ten-minute walk from the Guggenheim, holds a genuinely excellent collection, and on a Monday it is almost empty. Most visitors give up on museums the moment they learn the Guggenheim is closed — and walk straight past an open one.

What else works on a Monday

• The Fine Arts Museum. Worth repeating. It’s the single most wasted opportunity in the city.
• Walk the river. The Abandoibarra promenade runs from the Guggenheim to the city hall. It doesn’t close and it doesn’t cost anything.
• Artxanda. The funicular takes about a minute and puts the whole city below you. Go in daylight.
• The Casco Viejo. Shops will be shut, but the streets and a good share of the bars are not.
• Look at the outside of the Guggenheim anyway. Puppy, the Maman spider, the titanium — none of that needs a ticket, and it’s half of why the building is famous.

Sunday is a different problem

Sunday mornings in Bilbao are fine. The trouble starts after lunch.

So from three in the afternoon on a Sunday, with the Fine Arts Museum shut and the shops down, you have the Guggenheim until seven and very little after that.

Then there’s dinner. Plenty of Bilbao restaurants close on Sunday night, and plenty more take Monday off entirely. Not all of them — but enough that wandering around at half past nine looking for a table is a real and fairly miserable experience.

One piece of advice worth more than this whole list: check opening hours on the day itself. They shift with the season, with public holidays, and with building work. A blog post from two years ago will not help you.

We’re open on Sundays and Mondays

That’s why we know all this. We’re one of the places that doesn’t close on those days, and we watch people walk in who have spent the afternoon finding shut doors.

El salón de mi casa is Bilbao’s first cat café. We open Sunday and Monday, 10am to 11pm. The kitchen runs until 10.30pm and the last booking is at 10pm, so you can have a proper dinner, not just something to pick at.

And there are rescued cats, which is the part that makes it different. It isn’t only somewhere to eat — it’s somewhere to sit down and stop. If you’ve spent three hours walking a closed city, that tends to be exactly what you needed.

We’re at Kristo Kalea 5 (Calle del Cristo 5), 48007 Bilbao, next to the city hall and five minutes from the Casco Viejo metro station. You can see the menu here or book at elsalondemicasa.com/reservas. Phone +34 944 08 02 12.

And if you’re here on a Monday with the Guggenheim closed: Fine Arts Museum in the morning, then come and sit with the cats. It’s the best day you can have in this city on a Monday.