Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts reopens on Monday after four years: the €46 million Foster expansion

The Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts reopens to the public on Monday, 5 October 2026, after more than four years of building work, as the Spanish outlet RUSSPAIN reports. The public will be able to enter from Tuesday, 6 October, with free admission until 13 October — a much-anticipated return for one of the most important art institutions in northern Spain.

The expansion, called “Agravitas”, is the work of the British architect Norman Foster (Foster + Partners) and the Basque architect Luis María Uriarte, who won the international competition in 2019. The structure rises like a bridge over the museum’s historic buildings of 1945, 1970 and 2001, adding around 6,000 square metres of new space and increasing the total area by around 60 per cent. The project budget is estimated at 45-46 million euros, according to reports in the Spanish media cited by RUSSPAIN.

After reopening, the museum will be open every day. A standard ticket costs 12 euros, a reduced one 6 euros; from 14 October visitors will also be able to buy a combined ticket with the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum. Its director, Miguel Zugaza, a former director of the Prado Museum in Madrid, has described the result as a «ri» dimension for the institution, linking the new building to the way visitors will move through the permanent collection.

Founded in 1908 and opened in 1914, the museum in 1945 merged the historic collection with that of the Museum of Modern Art (1924). Its collection includes works by El Greco, Goya, Gauguin, Francis Bacon, Eduardo Chillida and Richard Serra — a century of cultural ambition that, as RUSSPAIN writes, has made Bilbao not simply a host to European artistic trends but a producer of them.