Basque Country

After a night in Rouen we stopped in Le Mans, below the cathedral of Saint-Julien, whose Gothic choir and flying buttresses tower over the old town.

We reached La Rochelle in the evening. The entrance to its old harbour is guarded by two medieval towers, which are lit up at night, and the quays all around were full of people and restaurants.

The next morning, on the way south, we stopped at the Pointe de la Fumée near Fouras, where fishing huts stand on stilts above the water and Fort Boyard sits far out at sea.

In Bordeaux we stopped at the Cité du Vin, the wine museum on the bank of the Garonne, whose curving golden tower is meant to recall wine swirling in a glass.

We crossed into Spain in the early evening and had a first look at San Sebastián: the beach under a grey sky and the old town, whose streets were packed with people. It was 31 August, the day San Sebastián remembers every year how the town was burned in 1813, at the end of the Napoleonic wars.

Late that night we drove on to Bilbao.

We started the day in Bilbao at Azkuna Zentroa, an old wine warehouse turned by Philippe Starck into a cultural centre, then walked to the Guggenheim, Frank Gehry’s titanium museum on the river, and spent most of the afternoon around it. Nearby, Santiago Calatrava’s white Zubizuri footbridge crosses the river.

In the evening we drove back over the hills to San Sebastián.

San Sebastián, Donostia in Basque, was our base for the next few days. We swam in the pool and on the beach of La Concha, the wide crescent of sand around the bay, and in the evenings ate in the old town, famous for its pintxos.

One afternoon we walked along the bay to the far end of Ondarreta beach, where Eduardo Chillida’s iron sculptures, the Peine del Viento, grip the rocks at the edge of the sea.

A day trip south over the mountains took us to Rioja Alavesa, the Basque part of the Rioja wine region. Bodegas Ysios, Santiago Calatrava’s winery, has a long wavy roof that echoes the cliffs of the Sierra de Cantabria behind it. From the medieval hilltop town of Laguardia we looked out over a sea of vineyards.

In Elciego we toured the old cellars of Marqués de Riscal, with their huge wooden vats and a dark vault of dusty bottles, next to Frank Gehry’s hotel with its ribbons of coloured titanium. Then we drove back to the coast, to Anglet next to Biarritz.

The last two days were spent on the beaches of Biarritz, the old seaside resort just over the French border: little coves below the cliffs, the crowded Grande Plage with the lighthouse in the distance, and a sunset over the Rocher de la Vierge.

On the way home we stopped at the Dune du Pilat, the tallest sand dune in Europe, at the entrance to the Arcachon Bay. We climbed it in the evening and watched the sun go down over the ocean, with the pine forest stretching away inland.

Then we drove north through the night to Normandy and took the morning ferry from Ouistreham to Portsmouth.