Egurtek, the international forum on architecture and construction in wood, is held on 28 and 29 October 2026 at the Bilbao Exhibition Centre in Barakaldo.
The event pairs a two-day technical congress with a compact exhibition of timber construction suppliers in the venue's congress centre. The organiser reports more than 80 international speakers and exhibition space for over 50 participants, which positions it as a focused professional forum rather than a mass trade fair.
The 2026 programme is framed around mass timber building and the reduction of embodied carbon in construction. The Egurtek awards for timber architecture run alongside the congress.
The subject has moved from the margins of the construction industry to the centre of its regulatory agenda. Operational carbon in buildings has been addressed through insulation and efficiency standards for years, which has left embodied carbon, the emissions locked into the materials themselves, as the larger remaining share in a new building's lifetime footprint. Timber is the primary structural answer available at scale, and engineered products such as cross-laminated and glue-laminated timber have made it viable for mid-rise and increasingly for taller buildings.
What slows adoption is rarely the material. It is fire regulation, insurance and lender appetite, acoustic performance in residential buildings, and the shortage of structural engineers and contractors with timber experience. A technical congress is where those constraints get addressed, which explains the format.
The audience is architects, structural engineers, developers and timber systems manufacturers, drawn from Spain, France and the wider European Union. The Basque Country has an established timber and forestry industry alongside a concentration of architectural practices, which gives the event a strong local base.
The venue is in Barakaldo in greater Bilbao rather than in the city centre, a distinction worth noting for anyone arranging travel.
