Getting around BIO
Bilbao works out of a single terminal — Aena’s own airline directory tags its carriers with the same letter, “T” — twelve kilometres from the city Aena calls its capital of influence. In 2025 the airport handled 7,062,681 passengers across 70 destinations, and the building itself dates to 19 November 2000, when Aena opened a new north terminal area on the site of the one named after Carlos Haya half a century earlier; it is widely known, though not on Aena’s own pages, as “La Paloma” for its dove-like Calatrava design. There is no rail or tram link: Aena’s “Getting there” menu offers only car, bus, taxi and a pair of ride-hailing apps, so Bizkaibus carries the load into central Bilbao every 15 minutes, with two further lines reaching San Sebastián and Vitoria-Gasteiz. Inside, the airport also runs Spain’s first “technological tourist office”, a Basque Government project open around the clock.
