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Art & Culture
Cultural Heritage
The Bosque de Oma has a new location
Located in Kortezubi, within the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve, in the same area of the Oma Valley. It is a more sustainable, more accessible and more complete Oma Forest, but maintaining the same morphological conditions and the age of the original pine trees.
Twelve hectares that maintain the same essence of Agustín Ibarrola's work. There are other trees but the language used and the connection between the work and the environment remains the same.
We will find the chance to build a personalised work by means of decisions that we will make in the forest, walking along one or another path, looking at different spots. Therefore, for each visitor there is a forest that exists in different ways.
Free visit or guided visit
In both cases it is essential to book a ticket, which must be validated at the Santimamiñe-Oma service point one hour before the booked visit.
Free visit:
Guided tours:
How to get to the Oma Forest
It is not possible to get to the Forest by car. You have to walk from Santimamiñe to the Oma Forest (2.8km, approximately 50 minutes).
The small neighbourhood of Oma, in Kortezubi, contains a singular spot known as Bosque Animado (the Animated Forest) close to the Santimamiñe Caves. The Bilbao sculptor and artist Agustín Ibarrola painted it in 1984.
This is an enchanted forest located in a magical area that stresses a new connection between nature and art. There, the artist left traces on trees and stones aiming to link the works of the ancestral Palaeolithic artists with the modern tendency known as land art, an artistic current that works directly over the natural landscape, being the landscape itself the artist's cloth.
Thus, Ibarrola confined himself to paint the surface of pine trees, being aware that the holder he was using was not as inert as the cloth. Most of the figures are scattered around different trees, which are situated in different depths. So, Ibarrola, when covering thousands of pine trees with colours and life, created an enormous cloth that each visitor can compose again playing with the perspective while walking.
