Euskal Museoa

This guide to the Euskal Museoa in Bilbao centers on the Mikeldi idol, an Iron Age stone hog just over five feet tall, carved with etchings nobody can fully explain and first recorded in 1634 before vanishing from the historical record for over two and a half centuries. It traces the theories, religious symbol, boundary marker, territorial claim, that scholars have argued over since it resurfaced in 1896, and the building's own past life as a Jesuit school before the order's expulsion from Spain in 1767. Stand in the baroque cloister where the idol keeps watch and look it in the eye.