The planned expansion of the Bilbao Guggenheim museum has been scrapped after almost two decades of controversy.
Elizabeth Etxanobe, from the museum's executive committee, said the building of a satellite site on a nearby nature reserve would have been too "long, complex and yet completely unguaranteed".
The Frank Gehry-designed museum is widely regarded as having transformed the industrial city in Spain's Basque Country with the Bilbao effect seen as proof of the economic power of the arts.
But the planned $117 million expansion, complete with a tunnel dug through a nearby mountain, has been opposed from the start by campaigners saying the ecological damage it would cause in the Urdaibai Biosphere Reserve would outweigh any economic benefit.