This chapter presents the efforts of the city of Bilbao, throughout the seventeenth century, to achieve and maintain the status of an international centre of transatlantic trade, amidst tension confrontations between foreign and native trade communities, shipmasters and merchant traders. It covers the development of the port; the activity of the Consular Tribunal; the negotiation of bills; coin and currency control; and improvements in competitiveness, to determine that Bilbao, in the second half of the seventeenth century, secured substantial international trade that carried over well into the eighteenth.