Basque Country

The French Basque Country comes in three provinces whose names are still used to find one's way: Labourd, along the coast and up to Bayonne; Basse-Navarre, around Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port; and Soule, the easternmost, the most mountainous and the least visited. The whole is narrow: from the beach at Hendaye to the first summits is less than thirty kilometres, and you pass from ocean to mountain in a single morning. The coast itself runs only some thirty kilometres, between the mouth of the Adour to the north and that of the Bidassoa, which marks the Spanish border — and it changes character every ten. Biarritz owes its look to Eugénie de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III, who had a residence built there in 1854 and drew the court, then much of Europe, behind her; the villa is a hotel today, and the town has kept from that period its facades, its casino and its Rocher de la Vierge. The same coast takes a steady westerly swell, which gave rise to European surfing in the late nineteen-fifties, first on the Côte des Basques. Saint-Jean-de-Luz, a few kilometres south, offers the opposite: one of the rare calm bays on this coast, closed by three breakwaters built in the nineteenth century to hold the storms, a fishing port still working, and the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste where Louis XIV married Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660. Hendaye closes the coast to the south with three kilometres of sand. Bayonne, set back at the meeting of the Adour and the Nive, keeps its quays, its Gothic cathedral and a chocolate tradition going back to the families who came from Portugal in the seventeenth century. Inland, the country rises quickly. Espelette covers its facades with strings of peppers at the end of summer: the harvest runs from August to October, drying is done outdoors, and the protected designation covers around ten villages. Ainhoa and Sare, close by, are single-street villages built almost in one piece. Higher up, La Rhune reaches nine hundred and five metres and is climbed on foot or by a rack railway running since 1924, which takes some thirty minutes; from the top the view runs from the ocean to the Pyrenees. Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port is the last French stage on the pilgrim road to Compostela before the Roncevaux pass, and its streets keep the pink sandstone houses where pilgrims lodged. Further east still, Soule cuts into gorges — Kakuetta, Holzarte and its footbridge — and is far less visited. Culture here is not a backdrop, and three things show it. The language first: Euskara belongs to no known family, it appears on the road signs and is heard in conversation. Then the pelota wall: every village has one, often set against the church and the town hall, and the game is played in several forms, bare-handed, with the pala or with the chistera. Then the building: the Labourd house has a lime-washed facade, half-timbering painted dark red or green, and its main gable turned east to escape the westerly rain, under a roof often longer on one side than the other. The table follows the same logic: Bayonne ham, Ossau-Iraty sheep's cheese, gâteau basque, and the Irouléguy vineyard, the smallest in the Pyrenees. It rains here more than elsewhere on this coast, summer included, and the landscape owes it that: the country stays green all year, which is rare at this latitude. Village festivals run from June to September, with Bayonne holding its own in late July, in white and red, over five days. The rest of the time you alternate, a morning on the coast and an afternoon in the mountains, and it takes less than an hour to go from one to the other.