Things to do in Bayonne

Bayonne stands where the Nive runs into the Adour, a few kilometres before the river reaches the Atlantic. It is the working capital of the French Basque Country, not a resort. The beaches belong to its neighbours.

Two old towns, one river

The smaller river splits the centre in two, and the halves do different jobs.

• Grand Bayonne. The Gothic cathedral of Sainte-Marie and its cloister, listed by UNESCO with the other pilgrim routes to Santiago.
• Petit Bayonne. The Basque Museum on one quay and the bars that fill after dark on the next.
• The ramparts. Vauban's walls still ring both halves, and you can walk long stretches of them.
• The houses. Tall, narrow, and painted in the ox-blood red and green that repeat across the region.

Chocolate, ham and the market

Chocolate arrived in the seventeenth century with Jewish families expelled from Spain and Portugal. Bayonne made it before anywhere else in France. The chocolatiers along Rue Port-Neuf still trade on that.

The cured ham comes from the valleys inland and is salted with river-basin salt. Buy either at the source. The covered market on the Nive is the place to start.

Where the day goes

What gets booked here is usually the wider Basque Country, because a car strings it together and nothing else does.

• Biarritz. Eight kilometres west, with the surf beaches and the old imperial seafront.
• Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The bay and the church where Louis XIV married in 1660.
• Espelette. Red chillies drying on white house fronts, and the pepper that flavours half the region.
• Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Where pilgrims start the climb over the Pyrenees into Spain.

Practical

• Rain. The coast is green because it rains, and showers arrive in any month. Winter sits near 10C, summer is warm rather than baking, and the sea is swimmable from June to September.
• The one week. The Fetes de Bayonne fall at the end of July: five days, the whole town in white and red, and crowds counted in the hundreds of thousands.
• Arriving. Paris is about four hours by train, and Biarritz airport is a quarter of an hour away.
• Money. A pintxo runs two or three euros and a set lunch around fifteen. Service is charged in the bill, so nobody expects more than the coins.
• Hours. Plenty of shops still shut between one and three in the afternoon.