Postcard from... Bilbao

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/postcard-from-bilbao-10176893.html

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The former seminary buildings at Derio, just outside Bilbao, are so large that it takes a good 10 minutes to walk around the perimeter. Yet, by the time the seminary closed down in 1974 – when a vocational crisis began to affect Spain’s Catholic Church – the complex was reportedly home to just two future priests.

The seminary’s imposing central tower and two flanking buildings remain standing, but it is surely not for aesthetic reasons. Built in 1931 as a mental hospital and taken over by the church in the early 1950s, some would say its six-storey-high rough cement exterior walls, painted a kind of off-pink colour, have about as much visual charm as an Eastern Bloc 1970s police headquarters.

These days, the former seminary seems anything but unwelcoming. Situated in semi-rural grasslands and with its interior refurbished, it now houses a large hotel and restaurant as well as health clubs and gyms. The seminary is home to a top amateur bike team, too, called Euskadi.

Hundreds of young bike riders meet up for fun rides each week starting from underneath the building’s forbidding walls. What the seminary’s last few former inhabitants would have made of such gatherings outside their windows, though, we shall never know.