Miro Hotel Bilbao

As in Antonio Miró, the fashion designer, not Joan Miró, the late pseudo-Surrealist painter and sculptor — one imagines that if the latter were responsible for this hotel, Gehry’s Guggenheim might have had some competition for the title of most talked-about building in Bilbao. No surrealist fantasy, Antonio Miró’s hotel is more the sleek and stylish type, behind a striking facade of green aluminum and glass, cutting a serious and almost minimalist silhouette on the Alameda de Mazarredo, halfway between the Guggenheim and the Museo de Belles Artes.

The Miró is an art and fashion-world favorite — these rooms are spare, spacious, futuristic and highly functional, in a dramatic palette of whites and creams against black carpets and black marble bathrooms. Flat-screen televisions are par for the course, and the full-length windows admit plenty of natural light.

The hotel features a sleek little lobby bar that’s ideal for reading the newspaper or working on a laptop while enjoying a drink. There’s no restaurant, but the location in central Bilbao will see to it that you can’t walk two blocks without stumbling over a café or eatery on your way out to do the museums or the shops of the old quarter.