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Budget time: a weekend in Bilbao

Bárbara Gomes

Hello, beautiful people!!

As you may or may not know, I've spent a weekend in Bilbao with my boyfriend not long ago and I tell you everything about how we spent our time here.

However, even though I mention the price of one thing or two, that post does not focus on the cost of the trip, so I decided to write another one about it.

If you want to know the cost of a weekend in Bilbao, Spain, keep on reading! 😉

DISCLAIMER: We traveled from Portugal which is relatively close to Bilbao and we were not traveling with the lowest budget. I mean, we did have a controlled budget, but we didn't mind spending a little more if needed. So, keep in mind that there might be lower prices on some things.*

Let's get to it!

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Flights and Transportation

We bought a two-way ticket from Oporto Airport on Friday evening and that would come back from Bilbao airport on Sunday evening. We usually choose this schedule every time we do these weekend trips because we have to work on Friday so we can only leave Portugal on Friday night and then we need to be back to work on Monday. This allows us to enjoy as much as possible without having to take days off from work.

The price of both tickets was 146,96€ (73,48€ each).

As I said in the previous post about this trip, we used the Bizkaia bus for the connection between the airport and the city.

Each ticket is 3€ so we spent a total of 12€ on this (2 tickets to Bilbao on Friday and 2 tickets to the airport on Sunday).

In terms of transport, we had two more expenses in Portugal which were the trip from home (Braga) to the airport (Oporto) and the parking at the airport for the whole weekend.

We spent 10,50€ on the parking and 15€ to go to the airport and come back. These aren’t exactly costs of a weekend in Bilbao but they might be useful if you are from Portugal and you’re leaving from the Oporto airport 😉

Accommodation

When it comes to accommodations, we like to have a little bit more comfort whenever possible. I know we won’t spend a lot of time there but we like the comfort of the hotel when we come back from a whole day of walking.

I am saying this so that you can be aware that this is not the most inexpensive option of accommodation in Bilbao so, if you look for cheaper options, you can find them.

This being said, we stayed at a 4-star hotel that was very accessible in price and very well located. It was Hotel Silken Indautxu and we paid 155,50€ for 2 nights with a great breakfast.

I believe this hotel is kind of divided into two areas. One with more expensive and luxurious stays (I guess because I didn’t see them 🙈). The other with the more accessible options, which was our area 😁

We really liked our stay. The hotel is really good, the breakfast was amazing and the location was perfect! Walking distance from everywhere.

Places we visited

For the whole weekend, we only visited one place where we had to buy tickets, which was Guggenheim.

We bought two adult tickets to visit the museum and we paid 30€ (15€ each).

To buy the tickets, you can either do it while you’re there or you can buy them online here.

We didn’t have time to visit everything so we had to give up visiting the Fine Arts Museum but if you want to visit both museums, you can buy a common ticket and you save a little on the ticket price. So, keep that in mind 😉

Food

Eating in Bilbao may be very expensive or very cheap. Let me explain!

Bilbao is very well known for its amazing cuisine And Michelin star restaurants. So, naturally, you can expect your dinner bill to be a bit high.

However, if you prefer, you could have pintxos for dinner and it’s a whole lot cheaper.

While researching for a place to eat on Saturday night, besides pintxos, the cheapest restaurant we found was 40€/person which was a lot for us.

The other option is to go for pintxos and you can find places that sell 1€ or 2€ each. In fact, I would say that most places sell them at those prices but you’ll also find some more expensive variations that can cost you 2,5€ or 3€. Still, an inexpensive and tasty (at least, the majority of times) option.

We had pintxos on Saturday afternoon and the whole meal (a beer, water, and 6 pintxos or so) cost us 13€.

We also opted for pintxos on Sunday before leaving for the airport and we spent 20€ on around 10 pintxos, water, and a beer.

For dinner, on Saturday, we didn’t want pintxos because we had already eaten that during the afternoon but we didn’t what to spend more than 40€ each to eat.

Our solution? Pizza Hut! 🙈

We had pizza, drinks and garlic bread for 13,50€. Not the perfect solution because it’s not exactly local food but it was what we had.

Overall cost & Important notes

To sum it up, we ended up spending around 390€ (195€ each) plus the expenses to go by car to the Oporto airport (25,50€ in total).

Taking into account the things we wanted to do but didn’t have time, we would be spending a little bit more on tickets and attractions but overall, we don’t think Bilbao is an expensive city to spend a few days in. Of course, there might be other factors that will make your trip more or less expensive depending on when you visit and the type of accommodation you choose. We traveled at the beginning of November and chose a 4-star hotel with cheaper options.

Just to give you an idea of what I am talking about, I leave you some more information about prices below:

  • Funicular de Artxanda (an easy access to Monte de Artxanda to have a great view of Bilbao) will cost you 2,5€ per one way ticket or 4,30€ for a two-way one.

  • Fine Arts museum: you can buy a general ticket for 7€ or you can get a common ticket for both museums (Guggenheim and Fine Arts) for 18€. This is the Bono Artean ticket if you look for it on the website of either of the museums. If you are planning to visit both museums, this Bono Artean is definitely worth it.

  • Cheaper accommodation: you can find some cheaper options like the ones below.

Hope you liked this post and that you found it useful. We tried to include our experience as well as the information we gathered while there and while planning the trip.

Let me know in the comments if this post helped you and share information that I might have missed 😉

Have a wonderful trip!

XOXO,

Bárbara

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