Bilbao

The Elizabethan sword is named for a Basque port.

Bilbao's ironworking reputation gave English bilbo for a good blade. The spelling records how English speakers heard the city's name.

One museum turned a declining industrial port into a case study that planners have chased ever since.

Frank Gehry's Guggenheim opened in Bilbao in 1997, in a Basque city whose shipbuilding and steel had collapsed, and it drew about a million visitors a year almost at once. The phrase is often credited to the English writer Jonathan Meades. It is now used as often for the copies that failed as for the original that worked.