Calle del Nervión

It takes its name from the Nervión, the river that runs through Bilbao and flows into the Cantabrian Sea, in the El Viso neighborhood where nearly every street bears the name of a Spanish river.

The Nervión descends from Orduña and, crossing Bilbao, forms its estuary before reaching the Cantabrian Sea. El Viso, a residential colony laid out in the 1930s, turned its street map into a river atlas of Spain: a few steps from Calle del Nervión run the Galician Sil, the Castilian Tormes, the Valencian Turia and the Navarrese Arga. Read one after another, these signs let you cross half the country’s waterways without leaving Chamartín. For centuries the river had no single name: locals spoke of the “Greater Water,” and in Basque they called it Ibaizabal, “wide river.” The form Nervión wasn’t fixed until the late 18th century, though its oldest echo comes from the Greek geographer Ptolemy, who around the year 150 noted the mouth of the “Nerva river.” Today it is a short residential street, lined with garden hotels and pale-brick Rationalist façades.