San Francisco

This guide to the San Francisco district in Bilbao opens in 1873, when the city's new hygiene police patrolled what officials called a necessary evil, ranking and taxing the brothels of la Palanca street by street. You'll meet two women who ran afoul of that system in very different ways, Ignacia Otaegui and Bernardina Escauriza, before it follows the neighborhood through later waves of Roma, Moroccan and Latin American arrivals, and the heroin years locals still remember. It traces a district that kept reinventing itself long after the ordinances that once policed it were forgotten.