100 Places in France Every Woman Should Go by Marcia DeSanctis

Author:Marcia DeSanctis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction / Travel
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
Published: 2014-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

VILLAGES OF THE PAYS BASQUE

The Pyrénées divide France from Spain, and early morning on the highway from the city of Pau through the Béarn to the Atlantic coast, the strip of mountains are a veritable distraction. On my left, due south, they extend in curves of violets, blues and grays, and it contributes to the sense of a border that in these parts is otherwise quite fluid. Signs on the highway begin to appear in both French and Basque and when I arrive in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, one of the seaside jewels of the Western Pyrénées, Saint Sebastián, Spain is a ten-minute walk along the beach trail, no passport required. But this adventure is about going back inland, eating pur brebis sheep’s cheese and buttery cake in the towns of the Pays Basque, in this most unusual, pitch perfect southwestern corner of Aquitaine.

Here, it’s almost impossible to hit a false note. There is an exquisite and palpable balance between where to go and feeling good when you get there. Mountains meet the waves in glamorous port towns via green hills grazed by milking sheep called manech—with colored faces and legs. Sturdy villages erupt from bends in the road, and they don’t have to try hard to entice you with comfort. What the Pays Basque has, like the Pays d’Auge in Normandy, is a sharply delineated identity, customs found nowhere else in France and pride to match.

“We celebrate everything here,” says my guide Nathalie, and she is not exaggerating. The press dossier on festivals in the Pays Basque and the Béarn (very connected spiritually, though slightly inland) takes fourteen single-spaced pages. On any given day, all year long, somewhere there is a party. They celebrate salt, shepherds, corn, hake fish, tuna fish, ham, pigs, pepper, Irouléguy wines, the grape harvest, dance, the river Nive, night surfing, and yes, the beret and everything else Basque. Espadrilles. Peaches. Cheese. The big sports of the region—rugby and pelote (like jai alai)—played in frontons in the center of every town, or in trinquets that resemble wooden squash courts.

Saint-Jean-de-Luz is a perfect place to begin. It’s also a nearly perfect village, the kind of place where a woman feels not just safe and undisturbed, but good. Really good. It’s a walking town attached to a broad beach with crystalline water, a creamy surf, and a boardwalk with barely a glimmer of bling—if you want, you can find that in Biarritz about thirty minutes up the coast, but even there you’ll have to look hard.

After coffee in the Place Louis XIV, across from the house where the Sun King lived when he married the King of Spain’s daughter Maria-Theresa here in May 1660, I peruse the shopping district. First stop: Sandales Concha on rue Gambetta, for espadrilles. Everyone genuinely wears them, as they must have been designed for long strolls up and down the beach promenade. I buy mine in black, with a little wedge heel, and a flat pair with stripes that I slide on at once.

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