Bilbao, Autonomous Community of the Basque Country, Spain
The Calzadas de Mallona are the stone steps that climb out of the back of Bilbao's old town and finish on the esplanade in front of the Basilica of Begoña. They begin in Plaza Miguel de Unamuno, at the upper edge of the Siete Calles, and they go up in one sustained flight after another with no real flat section to recover on.
Two things are worth knowing before you set off. The step count you will see quoted is not reliable, and the lift that older guidebooks and blog posts send you to has not run since 2014. There is still a way up that does not involve the stairs, but it is a different one, and it is inside the metro station.
Where the stairs start
Plaza Miguel de Unamuno sits at the eastern end of the Casco Viejo, past the Ribera market and the seven streets that give the quarter its name. The square is named after the writer and philosopher, and as @txatxy noted in a 2019 walk up the steps, Miguel de Unamuno was born nearby, at number 16 of Ronda street.
The square does three jobs at once. It is a metro entrance, it is where people sit with a drink from the bars along its edge, and it is the foot of the stairway. The steps are not tucked away behind anything: they rise straight out of the square, wide and grey, with the Archaeology Museum on one side. The lower flights double as public seating, which is why photographs of them are usually full of people who are not going anywhere.
If you arrive expecting a signposted trailhead you will walk straight past it. The stairway reads as part of the square until you are standing at the bottom looking up.
How many steps? The counts do not agree
This is the question people search, and the honest answer is that published counts contradict each other. @txatxy, who lives in the city and walked the route with a camera, put it at 311 steps from the square to the basilica esplanade. Other counts circulating online run higher, into the 320s and beyond 350, and they are not obviously wrong either.
The discrepancy is not sloppiness. The stairway is not one clean flight. It changes width, and it is broken by landings and by ramped sections that carry water off the hill when it rains. Where you decide the stairs start, and whether you count the last shallow sets up to the basilica door, moves the total by dozens.
The useful number is not the count anyway. It is that the climb is continuous. There is no midpoint where the ground levels off, and the only real breaks are the ones you choose to take at the landings.
What the climb is actually like
The view is the reward, and it arrives early. A few flights up, the old town opens out behind you: narrow streets running downhill between rows of glazed balconies, painted deep red and green, with a wooded mountain closing off the far end. It costs nothing and it arrives before the climb has had time to hurt.
Higher up, the gaps between buildings give you roofs rather than streets, and the mountains that ring Bilbao come into the frame properly. @txatxy explains the local nickname for the city, El Bocho, the hole, as coming from exactly this: Bilbao sits in a bowl with green ridges on every side. The Mallona steps are one of the cheapest ways to see the shape of it.
The stairway also has a religious life that surfaces at certain points in the year. @txatxy describes it turning into a via crucis during Holy Week and at the Virgin of Begoña's feast, and recalls that people once climbed it barefoot, some on their knees, to keep a promise made to the Virgin. Nobody does that on an ordinary Tuesday. It is worth knowing that this is a pilgrimage route that happens to have a view, rather than a viewpoint that happens to have a church on it.
The lift that closed, and the one that works
If you cannot manage a few hundred steps, the internet will tell you to take the Ascensor de Begoña. Do not plan around that. The Ascensor de Begoña was built in 1943 by the architect Rafael Fontán to bridge the drop between the Begoña neighbourhood and the old town, and it stopped operating on 8 July 2014. Posts and listings written before that date, and plenty written after it, still send people to a lift that is not running.
What replaced it is the lift system inside the Zazpikaleak/Casco Viejo metro station, which now carries the traffic the old ascensor used to. You enter from Plaza Unamuno, the same square the steps rise from, and come out at the top of the hill in the Mallona area of Begoña, a short walk from the basilica.
Buses run up there too. @txatxy is blunt about the trade: the lift takes you almost to the top and you lose the best part of the old town by using it, so the sensible compromise is to ride up and walk down. The descent gives you the same view with none of the work.
What is at the top
The Basilica of Begoña stands on an esplanade lined with plane trees, and the approach hides it until you are almost there. The tower shows first, above the branches, and then the front of the building appears through a gap in the trees rather than at the end of a grand avenue.
The Virgin of Begoña is the patron of Biscay, known locally as the Amatxu, the mother. The basilica is where the city marks things, and @txatxy notes that the footballers come up here to present a cup when they win one. It is a working parish church rather than a monument with a ticket desk, so the interior opens around services and the times move through the year. Check them before you plan a visit that depends on getting inside.
If you want the bigger view, take the funicular instead
The Mallona steps give you the old town from above. They do not give you Bilbao from above. For the full panorama, the city, the river, the stadium and the ring of mountains in one frame, the answer is Mount Artxanda on the other side of the river.
The Artxanda funicular takes three minutes and climbs to a park with viewpoints, restaurants along the ridge, and the sculpture @txatxy identifies as The Fingerprint by Juan José Novella, a memorial to the victims of the bombing of the hill in 1936. @txatxy paid €2 one way and €3.60 return in 2019, which is a good illustration of why old blog prices should not be trusted: the operator's current published fares are €3.50 one way and €6.00 return, with children under six free.
The same page gives the timetable. From 1 October to 31 May it runs 7:15 to 22:00 Monday to Saturday and 8:15 to 22:00 on Sundays and public holidays. From 1 June to 30 September it runs later on Fridays, Saturdays and the eves of holidays, until 23:00. Departures are every ten minutes between 11:00 and 20:00, and every fifteen minutes outside that window.
The estuary version, further downriver
Bilbao's habit of putting churches on high ground carries downstream. In Portugalete, near the mouth of the estuary, the Basilica of Santa María sits on the height that dominates the entrance to the ría. That is a separate trip rather than an extension of the Mallona climb, but it runs on the same logic: get above the town and the water, and the shape of the place explains itself.
@txatxy photographed it on a clear winter day, when the bare trees left the facade exposed, and argued that you do not need to be religious to find the architecture worth the time.
When to climb
Summer suits the stairway, because the planted sections beside it come into flower, and @txatxy rates those gardens as a reason to stop on the way up rather than push through. Summer also means climbing heated stone with very little shade.
Winter in Bilbao is mild and wet more often than it is cold, which is why the city stops when it does snow. @txatxy left work, went home for a camera and came back out, and the resulting post is a record of a place with no practice at it: the mountains turning white behind the Deusto bridge, icicles hanging off the fountains, swans on iced water in the park, and, in the writer's phrase, a city making the special noise of laughter.
Snow is not something to plan a trip around. Rain is. Wet granite is slick, and the ramped channels beside the steps are there because this hill sheds a lot of water. In heavy rain, take the lift.
Practical details
The stairway starts at Plaza Miguel de Unamuno in the Casco Viejo. The nearest station is Zazpikaleak/Casco Viejo, served by the metro and by Euskotren, with an entrance in the square itself. There is no ticket, no gate and no opening time for the steps: they are a public street, usable at any hour.
Wear something with grip. Take water in summer. If the full climb is not realistic, take the metro station lift up and walk down. That is the version @txatxy recommends, and it hands you the descending view of the old town, which is the best part of the route anyway.
For more from the region, the Spain destination page collects TravelFeed writers' posts, and an earlier guide to the Aizkorri-Aratz trails covers the mountains an hour inland.
FAQ
How many steps are the Calzadas de Mallona?
Around 300 to 350, depending on where the count starts and finishes. @txatxy, a Bilbao local, counted 311 from Plaza Unamuno to the basilica esplanade. The stairway is broken by landings and ramped sections, which is why published figures disagree.
Is there a lift to the Basilica of Begoña?
Yes, but not the one most older sources name. The historic Ascensor de Begoña, built in 1943, stopped operating on 8 July 2014. The lifts inside the Zazpikaleak/Casco Viejo metro station now do the same job, taking you from Plaza Unamuno up to the Mallona area of Begoña, near the basilica.
Are the Mallona stairs worth it, or should I take the Artxanda funicular?
They answer different questions. The stairs give you the Casco Viejo from above, close up, with the streets and balconies still legible. Artxanda gives you the whole city, the river and the mountains in a single view. If you only do one and you want the classic Bilbao panorama, take the funicular.
Does it snow in Bilbao?
Rarely. Bilbao's winters are mild and wet rather than freezing, and real snowfall in the city is unusual enough that residents treat it as an event, as @txatxy's photographs of a snowed-in Bilbao show. Snow on the surrounding mountains is a more common sight than snow in the streets.
Reporting for this guide draws on four posts by @txatxy, a photographer based in Bilbao, alongside the Artxanda funicular operator's published fares and timetable.
