Associated with the city's expansion in the second half of the 19th century, the Ensanche was an urban space suited to the industrial and financial capital that the Town had become at national level and as part of Europe. It could be defined as an exclusive commercial space at the city's institutional and economic core.

Here, on either side of the Gran Vía, the city's main street, in the presence of many of the institutional, economic, and financial symbols of the old Bilbao--the Stock Exchange, the Bank of Spain, the BBVA, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia, the National Exchequer, etc.--is the most carefully preserved, most select commercial concentration in the city: the department stores, prestigious international firms dealing in haute couture, jewellery, perfumery, and design, making up an exclusive shopping area, the city's most cosmopolitan economic dimension.

In the immediate area, the extension of the Gran Vía and its opening onto the Plaza Indautxu via the pedestrian street Ercilla and the select Rodríguez Arias; and toward the Estuary by Colón de Larreategui, weave a broad urban network of more than 1800 high-level commercial establishments,which make up the central offer of goods and services in the metropolitan environment of Greater Bilbao.

It is in this urban business area, which lives with the intensity proper to the centre of a great metropolis, but in which there continue to be places for tranquillity, getting-together, and relaxation, that the Bilbao of the 21st century projects its new icons over the rediscovered Estuary: from the symbolic Palacio de Congresos (Conference Hall) and the Música Euskalduna to Uribitarte and the Calatrava passageway passing by the emblematic Guggenheim and the new changes envisaged in Abandoibarra. Nowhere else can we find a greater concentration of symbols of the new Bilbao, or a better way of understanding commerce in collaboration and union with the other services.