Aste Nagusia (Bilbao Big Week)
22 August 2026 · movable holiday — Hands up! Marijaia opens the party – nine days of fun!
Aste Nagusia (Basque for “Big Week”) is Bilbao’s biggest festival and one of the largest in the Basque Country. It begins on the first Saturday after 15 August and lasts nine days. The modern festival dates from 1978, after the end of the dictatorship, when the city revived its street celebrations. The programme is packed with free concerts, fireworks, traditional Basque rural sports such as stone lifting and wood chopping, parades and food in festive stalls known as txosnak. The symbol of the festival is Marijaia, a big cheerful doll with raised arms. She is raised at the start of the week and burned at the end, a sign that the party is over and will return next year. Because the festival falls in mid-August, the nights are warm and often clear, and the Perseid meteors, which peak around 12–13 August, have just lit up the sky beforehand.
Flying across the sky: An ethereal, bluish-silver figure made of luminous dots and thin lines, like a constellation drifting across the night sky: a cheerful rag-doll-like woman with both arms raised high in joy, her wide skirt traced in sparkling star points
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