St. Jean de Luz is a small town, so it was easy to get around on foot. There were interesting things to see, but not so many that we felt rushed our pressured to make sure we saw all of the "highlights." And it just had a nice, laid back feel to it. It is also a very picturesque town.
Nice town! |
The next day, we did some touristing- including a visit to the main church, which even I had to admit was an interesting church. It has the tiers of wooden galleries that I gather are characteristic of churches in this part of the world. There is also a model of a ship hanging from the ceiling- also characteristic of Basque churches.
Nice church! |
The Chateau d'Urtubie was originally built in the 14th century. It is still owned by the original family, although they don't stay in the castle itself these days, preferring the renovated old stables building. I can't blame them- there was a definite musty smell in the castle. But there were also some beautiful tapestries, and a real sense of history.
Nice castle! |
On our way back to St.-Jean de Luz, we stopped briefly in Hendaye. We could tell it would be a nice beach vacation town in better weather, but everything was closed up when we were there, so we admired the view from the sidewalk by the beach, and then got back into our car and headed on to St.-Jean de Luz. We stopped at a marked viewpoint on the way. It was pretty, but we didn't really understand why there was a viewpoint there until we got back to our hotel and did some research to discover that la Corniche Basque ("the Basque Coast") is a big deal, sort of like the Pacific Coast Highway south of Monterey in California. It was indeed some beautiful scenery.
Nice coast! |
The next day, we walked across the bridge to the even smaller town of Ciboure, and walked on to Socoa, a for originally built by Henri IV.
Nice fort! |
It offered a nice view of the harbor and town of St.-Jean de Luz, and the walk to reach it was a pleasant way to spend the morning.
By the time we had finished looking around the fort, it was lunch time. We had a ham and cheese baguette from a bakery not far from the fort, and then walked back to our hotel. On our way, we finally understood the distinctive tower we'd seen near the harbor in St.-Jean de Luz. There is a matching one in Ciboure (painted with a green stripe instead of the red used on the St.-Jean de Luz side), and sailors use these towers to locate the mouth of the inner harbor.
Nice towers! |
Nice view! This is facing south, towards Socoa. |
Nice snack. The pintxos are in the little jars. I think this shows some sausage slices and curry shrimp. |
If you are heading to the region and want to order them, I'll save you some embarrassment and tell you they are pronounced "peen-chos." If you pronounce the X (as Mr. Snarky did when asking about them), you will get very puzzled looks.
After filling up on pintxos, we didn't want a very big dinner. We ended up at a restaurant on the other side of town from our pintxos spot. I ordered tomato soup and had a religious experience. Seriously, I had no idea tomato soup could taste that good. We also finally had some wine from St.-Emilion, and it was wonderful, too.
That evening was the perfect end our visit to St.-Jean de Luz. We got up the next morning, loaded up our car and headed east and north, spending a leisurely day driving to Dax, our next stop.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Sorry for the CAPTCHA, folks. The spammers were stealing too much of my time.