Loiu (Lujua)

The 07:40 easyJet from Gatwick touches down so gently you hardly feel the wheels kiss Spanish soil. Before the seat-belt signs blink off, the captain is already apologising for the “short taxi to a remote stand”. That trundle across the tarmac is your first glimpse of Loiu – a scatter of red roofs, a couple of stone farmhouses, and a cow field separated from the runway by a single hawthorn hedge. Most passengers simply file onto the shuttle bus and forget the place exists. They shouldn’t.

Loiu is not a city break and never will be. It is Bilbao’s overspill green lung, a municipality of meadows and hamlets that happens to have acquired an international airport without ever asking for one. The locals still call it Lujua in Euskera, and they still keep the old caserío system: each farmstead sits in its own patch of pasture, linked by narrow lanes just wide enough for a tractor and a nod of greeting. The moment you leave the terminal roundabout the traffic thins, the sky opens, and the Nervión valley smells of wet grass rather than jet fuel.

Where the Plane Noise Fades

Walk ten minutes east of the car-hire desks and you reach the parish church of San Pedro. It is nothing flash – a low, whitewashed rectangle with a modest belfry and a porch that catches the morning sun. What makes it useful is the bench outside: sit here long enough and you’ll work out how Loiu functions. A woman in gardening clogs walks a terrier; a lad on a scooter delivers bread to his aunt; someone’s grandfather parks the 4×4, leaves the engine running and slips inside for a two-minute confession. No one photographs anything.

From the church a lattice of lanes heads uphill towards the ermita of Santa Lucía. The gradient is gentle, but the surface changes every hundred metres: tarmac, gravel, packed earth, then suddenly a slab of limestone shiny with cow slobber. Waymarking is sporadic – a dab of yellow paint here, a Basque Government sticker there – so keep Google Maps open or, better, follow the pylons; they always lead to a hamlet with a tap and a stone trough. On a clear day you can see the Cantabrian ridge, a saw-tooth horizon that keeps the Atlantic rains corralled against the coast. When the cloud drops, the same ridge disappears and the valley feels like a lidded saucepan. Bring a waterproof whatever the season.

Lunch Without a Boarding Pass

The airport food court is perfectly edible – a Ritazza concession does a £3.20 bacon-style bap that British stag parties review with relief – but it is not Basque food. Ten minutes south of the terminal, Bar Aska occupies a 1950s bungalow beside the river. Inside, the menu is written on a paper tablecloth: txuletón for two (€38), pimientos de Gernika (€4), house txakoli served in a white ceramic jug so thin you can see the wine’s greenish hue through the glaze. They open at 13:00 sharp; if you arrive before 13:15 the steak is still on the counter waiting for the grill, and you’ll get the first slice of crust.

There is no accommodation inside the terminal fence. The nearest bed is at the Hotel Seminario, a modern block separated from Departures by a zebra crossing and a pine plantation. Doubles hover around €80 mid-week, €110 when Ryanair’s Friday morning rush begins. Rooms on the valley side overlook nothing more troubling than grazing ponies; the runway side provides free aircraft-spotting, though double glazing muffles the Pratt & Whitneys to a distant hum. Check-out is 24-hour, handy if your flight home leaves at 06:00.

Between Two Worlds

Loiu’s real charm is the way it shrinks distance. From the ermita you can watch a 737 lift off, then turn 180 degrees and see a farmer scything hay by hand. The same road that feeds the Bizkaibus to Bilbao also ends in a dirt track where signposts read “Galdakao 3 km” and the only traffic is a bloke on a quad bike moving irrigation pipes. Cycle west along the river and you reach the medieval bridge of Asúa, where Victorian iron ore used to rattle downhill to waiting ships; cycle east and you hit a nature reserve of reeds and kingfishers that smells faintly of kerosene when the wind turns.

Do not expect a postcard plaza or craft shops. The council has recently installed a children’s playground shaped like an aeroplane – the sole nod to tourism – but the nearest souvenir is a packet of airport Toblerone. What you get instead is space: wide verges for picnics, cows that stare but never charge, and the particular Basque habit of greeting strangers with a gravelly “Aupa” that sounds suspiciously like “Oi, you!” until you realise it is friendly.

Mud, Mist and Midday Sun

Spring and autumn are the comfortable seasons. April brings ox-eye daisies up to the knee and enough daylight to walk after your flight lands at 19:00. October is mushroom month; locals set off at dawn with wicker baskets and return before the 11:20 departure to Manchester. Summer can swelter – the valley traps heat – but every hamlet has a stone fountain; dunk your cap, drink, move on. Winter is green rather than white, yet the lanes turn to porridge after rain; trainers will be ruined within twenty minutes, so bring boots with tread.

If time is tight, allow ninety minutes for the loop from San Pedro to Santa Lucía and back. With half a day you can string together three hamlets – Lekunbiz, Artazaandia, Goikola – and still be at Departures two hours before gate closure. There is no railway; the Bizkaibus A3247 trundles every twenty minutes to Bilbao’s Moyúa square (€3, exact change appreciated). Taxis to the city run €25–30 after midnight when the buses stop, which is also exactly when the last pintxos bars in the Casco Viejo are mopping the counters.

The Honest Verdict

Loiu will never make anyone’s bucket list, and that is precisely its virtue. It is the place you choose when the flight is cheap, the hotel in Bilbao full, and you fancy waking to cowbells instead of refuse trucks. Come prepared for mud, for aircraft hum, for the fact that the nearest cathedral is a twelve-minute train ride away. Treat it as a lungful of green between metal tubes and you will leave wondering why more airports aren’t half as civilised as the village that accidentally grew around one.