1 Best Sight in Bilbao and the Basque Country, Spain

Archivo Real y General de Navarra

This Rafael Moneo–designed monolith of glass and stone, ingeniously contained within a Romanesque palace, is Pamplona's architectural pièce de résistance. With papers and parchments dating to the 9th century, the archive holds more than 75,000 linear feet of documents and has room for more than 55,500 feet more. The library and reading rooms are lined with cherrywood and crowned with a gilded ceiling, and there's a 12th-century crypt that you can visit for free.