Biarritz, and the Basque Coast Around It

An empress’s seaside folly that became the most glamorous resort in France, then reinvented itself as the birthplace of European surfing. With the chocolate-and-cathedral city of Bayonne and the long surf beaches of Anglet on either side, this stretch of Atlantic coast is one of the most complete corners of France. It is also one of my favourites.

I have come back to Biarritz more times than I can properly account for, and the pull is always the same. It is the particular quality of the light on the Grande Plage in the late afternoon, when the sun is dropping towards the Atlantic and the whole seafront takes on a kind of gilded, slightly faded grandeur, like a photograph of a more glamorous age that happens to still be going on around you. There are more beautiful beaches in France, and certainly warmer seas. But there is nowhere quite like Biarritz, because nowhere else has its specific combination of imperial swagger and salt-stained ease, of palace hotels and surfboards leaning against café walls, of old money and young waves. It is glamorous and it does not try very hard, which is the rarest and most attractive combination a place can have. 

To understand Biarritz, you have to understand that it was, for most of its history, nobody’s idea of a glamorous destination. It was a whaling station and then a fishing village, a modest settlement of a few hundred people clinging to a rocky stretch of the Basque coast, looking out at an ocean that gave them a living and occasionally took it back.

The transformation, when it came, was the work of one woman. Empress Eugénie de Montijo, the Spanish-born wife of Napoleon III, had known this coast since childhood and fell in love with its wild beauty. In 1854 she persuaded the Emperor to build a summer palace on the seafront, the Villa Eugénie, and the moment the imperial couple began spending their summers there, the rest of European society followed, as it always did wherever an empress went. The fishing village became a court. Within a generation it had acquired grand villas, a casino, a promenade and the unmistakable architecture of a place that has decided to take itself seriously. Queen Victoria came. Alfonso XIII of Spain came. The villa itself became the Hôtel du Palais, which still dominates the Grande Plage today, its red-and-cream façade built in the shape of an E for Eugénie, a palace turned hotel that remains the grandest address on the coast.

The twentieth century only deepened the glamour. Coco Chanel and Paco Rabanne opened workshops here. André Courrèges, the inventor of the miniskirt, lived in the town. Rita Hayworth, Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper and Bing Crosby all passed through. Biarritz spent a hundred years as one of the places the famous and the fashionable went to be seen being effortless, and although the centre of gravity of European glamour has long since moved elsewhere, the town has never quite lost the habit. You feel it most on the Grande Plage, where modern sunbathers share the same sand as the ghosts of aristocrats, and the striped bathing tents make a photogenic patchwork against the backdrop of the old hotels.

And then, in the middle of all that imperial nostalgia, something completely different happened. In 1957, an American screenwriter named Peter Viertel was in Biarritz working on a film adaptation of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. He had brought a surfboard. The waves rolling in at the Côte des Basques, the long exposed beach just south of the town centre, turned out to be very good indeed, and the locals who watched him ride them were, by most accounts, the beginning of European surfing.

What is remarkable is how completely Biarritz absorbed this second identity without abandoning the first. The town that had been a playground for kings became, simultaneously, the surf capital of Europe, and the two things have coexisted ever since with no apparent friction. You can have breakfast in a palace and an afternoon in a wetsuit. The surf schools plant their coloured flags along the Côte des Basques, the boards lean against the café walls, the surf brands and the couture boutiques share the same streets, and none of it feels contradictory. Half ritzy, half hippy, as one guide neatly put it. This is the essential character of modern Biarritz, and it is what makes the place feel so alive rather than merely preserved.

The Grande Plage is where I would send anyone first. It is the heart of the town’s seaside identity, the beach where French high society first embraced sea bathing in the nineteenth century, and it remains the great social stage of Biarritz: a broad sweep of sand backed by the grand hotels and the casino, with the striped tents and the surfers and the promenaders all sharing the same view. Walk the length of it in the late afternoon and you understand the whole town at once.

From there, the coastal path is the great pleasure of the place. It runs from the Côte des Basques in the south, past the old fishing port — Port des Pêcheurs, a pocket of fishermen’s cottages and tiny seafood restaurants tucked into the rocks — and out to the Rocher de la Vierge, a rocky islet topped with a white statue of the Virgin and connected to the mainland by a footbridge attributed to the workshop of Gustave Eiffel. The views from the rock, back along the coast and out into the Atlantic, are the postcard image of Biarritz and entirely deserve to be. The path continues north towards the lighthouse, built in 1834 on a clifftop seventy-three metres above the sea, which separates the rocky Basque coast from the long sandy beaches of Les Landes stretching away to the north. The climb is two hundred and forty-eight steps and the reward, on a clear evening, is one of the great coastal views of France.

The Imperial Chapel, built for Eugénie in 1864, is the town’s quietest treasure: a small, eclectic jewel box of Roman-Byzantine and Hispano-Moorish styles, with azulejo tiles imported from Seville and golden mosaics, dedicated to a Mexican saint in honour of the Empress’s heritage. It is easy to miss and worth seeking out. The Art Deco aquarium, the Musée de la Mer, is a fine wet-weather option and a beautiful building in its own right. And the surf museum, the Cité de l’Océan, tells the story of the town’s second life for anyone curious about how it all began.

But the truest pleasure of Biarritz is less a list of sights than a way of spending a day: the beach in the morning, the market at midday, the coastal path in the gilded late afternoon, an aperitif as the sun goes down over the Atlantic. The town rewards drifting more than ticking off.

No account of Biarritz is complete without its covered market, Les Halles, renovated in 2015 and packed with the produce of one of the great food regions of France. This is where the town does its grazing: oyster stalls where you can eat a dozen with a glass of cold white standing up, charcuterie counters hung with Bayonne ham, cheese stalls heavy with Ossau-Iraty, the ewe’s-milk cheese of the Pyrenees, and the famous Espelette pepper in every form, the red, fruity, gently warming chilli that is the defining seasoning of Basque cooking and the only French spice to hold its own protected designation.

The Basque table is one of the genuine glories of this coast, and a few dishes function less as menu options than as requirements. Ttoro is the local fisherman’s stew, a rich tomato-based affair of hake, monkfish, langoustines and mussels seasoned with Espelette, and a benchmark for any seafood restaurant in town. Axoa de veau — pronounced “achoa” — is a slow-cooked veal and sweet pepper stew, deeply regional and usually served with potatoes. Piperade is the great Basque dish of eggs, peppers and tomatoes with Espelette, simple and perfect. Ossau-Iraty with black cherry jam is the non-negotiable cheese course. And gâteau basque, the dense, buttery tart filled with either cherry jam or pastry cream, is the essential sweet finish: buy one from a market stall, eat half of it immediately, and feel no obligation whatsoever to share the rest. To drink, look for Irouléguy, the local Basque wine, or a glass of txakoli, the faintly sparkling white poured from a height that comes from just across the Spanish border.

Eight kilometres inland, where the rivers Nive and Adour meet, sits Bayonne, and it would be a mistake to treat it as a day trip from Biarritz rather than a destination in its own right. If Biarritz is the glamorous coast, Bayonne is the cultural soul: the unofficial capital of the French Basque Country, a Ville d’Art et d’Histoire, and a place that wears its heritage with considerably more swagger than its size would suggest.

It is a beautiful city to simply walk. The old quarters, Grand Bayonne and Petit Bayonne, are a tangle of narrow streets lined with tall, slender Basque houses painted in the traditional colours — that particular oxblood red and forest green against white render — their shutters and beams picked out in colour, leaning together over the cobbles. The River Nive runs through the middle, lined with riverside bars and crossed by bridges, and the comparison that gets made, not unreasonably, is to a Basque Amsterdam. Dominating it all is the Gothic Cathedral of Sainte-Marie, begun in 1213 and several centuries in the making, with one of the largest and most beautiful cloisters in France alongside it.

But Bayonne’s two great claims are edible. It is the historic capital of French chocolate: cocoa beans first arrived in France through this port in the 1490s, brought by Jewish artisans fleeing persecution in Spain and Portugal, and by 1870 the town had over a hundred and thirty chocolate makers. A handful of the great houses remain, and the proper way to experience them is a cup of thick, frothy hot chocolate beneath the arcades of the Rue Port-Neuf. And it is the home of Bayonne ham, the air-dried, gently salted cured ham that hangs from rafters all over the region and carries protected status of its own. Between the chocolate, the ham, the cheese and the Espelette, Bayonne is one of the most rewarding food cities in France, and its market, the Carreau des Halles on the bank of the Nive, is the place to understand why.

If you can time a visit to the Fêtes de Bayonne in late summer, the largest festival in France and a riot of white-and-red costume, music and Basque tradition, you will see the city at its most exuberant. If you would rather avoid the crowds, almost any other week of the year rewards a quieter wander.

Between Biarritz and Bayonne, completing the trio the locals call the BAB, lies Anglet, and its character is different again. Where Biarritz is grand and Bayonne is historic, Anglet is the open-air one: a town of eleven beaches strung along five kilometres of Atlantic coast, backed by pine forest, given over almost entirely to the sea and the active life.

The beaches are the point. They run one after another along the coast — Les Cavaliers, where the serious surfers and the competitions gather; Marinella and Les Sables d’Or, where the families go; La Chambre d’Amour, the best-known of them, named for a sea cave and a local legend of two lovers caught by the rising tide. Behind the dunes lies the Forêt du Pignada, a great pine forest threaded with paths for walking, running and cycling, and the long seafront promenade that links the beaches is one of the finest coastal walks on this part of the Atlantic. Anglet is where you come for the surf and the sand and the salt air rather than the sights, and after a few days of imperial Biarritz and historic Bayonne, the simplicity of it is welcome. It is also where the airport sits, which means it is very often the first and last of the three towns a visitor sees.

Getting there. The Biarritz-Anglet-Bayonne airport — the BAB, as the towns themselves are known — sits in Anglet at the centre of all three, with year-round flights from Paris and several European cities including London, and is no more than twenty minutes from any of them by bus or taxi. By rail, the TGV runs from Paris to Biarritz in around four and a half hours. San Sebastián, just over the Spanish border, is about an hour away, which makes a side trip into Spanish Basque Country very easy.

Getting around. This is the great practical pleasure of the region: the three towns are linked by the Chronoplus bus network, and at the time of writing a single ticket costs around one euro and a day pass very little more, with frequent electric shuttle buses serving the centres and the beaches. You genuinely do not need a car to enjoy the BAB, though one is useful if you intend to explore the wider Basque interior — the villages of Espelette and Itxassou, the Irouléguy vineyards, the mountains.

When to go. Summer is the full experience: the sun-and-sea season, the beaches at their best, the surf schools in full swing, the markets and terraces at their liveliest. It is also the busiest and the most expensive, and the most sought-after restaurant tables in July and August want booking two to three weeks ahead. The shoulder seasons of late spring and early autumn are quieter, softer and arguably lovelier, with warm days, smaller crowds and the same gilded light. The Atlantic this far north is bracing rather than warm at any time of year, which the surfers consider a feature. Even winter has its pleasures: the town’s long-established thalassotherapy spa culture, built on heated seawater, comes into its own when the beaches empty, and the chocolate of Bayonne is never better than in the cold.

Where to base yourself. Biarritz is the obvious choice for a first visit and the most glamorous, with everything from the palatial Hôtel du Palais down to simpler seafront hotels. Anglet suits those who want the surf and the beaches above all. Bayonne rewards anyone who would rather wake up in a historic city than a resort. With the bus network tying all three together, you can base yourself anywhere and have the others within easy reach.