France
Biarritz
Atlantic rollers breaking below Art Deco balustrades where surfers and an empress shared the same bay.
The Atlantic hits the rocks and the spray reaches the promenade, where the Art Deco railings carry the patina of salt and old empire. Biarritz, on France's Basque coast, holds two identities at once — the nineteenth-century resort where Empress Eugénie bathed and the surf town where European wave-riding began on the Grande Plage — and both are still here, sharing the same coastline without apology.
Biarritz sits on the Basque coast where the Pyrenees run down into the Bay of Biscay, and its architecture is a mix of Art Deco, neo-Basque and neo-Norman — the casino on the Grande Plage, the villas on the cliffs, the Hôtel du Palais that began as the villa Napoleon III built for Eugénie. Surfing arrived in 1957 with an American film crew who saw the waves and sent for boards, and the town has been a surf capital ever since; today it prizes golfers too. Walk the coast past the fishermen's port with its coloured cabins to the Rocher de la Vierge, the rock stack reached by an iron footbridge with the whole Basque coast running south towards Spain. The covered market piles up Bayonne ham, Ossau-Iraty and gâteau basque, and the backstreets run on pintxos and txakoli until late.
Solo
Surf in the morning, pintxos in the afternoon, the coast path in the evening. Biarritz has the energy of a surf town and the architecture of a lost empire — the contrast is interesting alone.
Couple
The Grande Plage at sunset, with the Art Deco casino lit behind you and the Atlantic darkening ahead. Follow it with a pintxos crawl through the old quarter — the Basque influence turns every bar into a shared discovery.
Friends
The surf breaks, the pintxos bars, the coast path, the late-night txakoli — Biarritz delivers the kind of shared days that generate stories for years afterwards.
- Atlantic swells roll in consistently — the Grande Plage is where European surfing began in 1957.
- Art Deco, neo-Basque and neo-Norman villas line the seafront alongside the Rocher de la Vierge — the built and the wild side by side.
- Basque pintxos bars fill the backstreets with small plates, txakoli and a convivial noise that lasts until midnight.
- The coast path passes the fishermen's port, rock formations and coves between the main beaches.
A pintxos crawl through the old town — Basque small plates piled on the bar, washed down with txakoli.
Gâteau basque from the covered market — buttery, filled with black-cherry jam or pastry cream, never both.
Tofino
Canada
A fishing village became Canada's cold-water surf capital without losing its working harbour.
Ucluelet
Canada
Each season the town's aquarium empties itself back into the harbour.
Big Drop-off
Palau
Step off shin-deep reef into a vertical abyss that drops nine hundred feet into darkness.
Pic du Midi
France
An observatory at 2,877 metres where you can sleep above the clouds and count the stars.
Reims
France
A cathedral where the kings of France were crowned, above kilometres of champagne cellars in chalk.
Aix-en-Provence
France
Plane-tree canopies dappling fountain-cooled boulevards where Cézanne saw geometry in everything.
Rochefort
France
A naval town where they rebuilt an eighteenth-century frigate plank by plank in the original dock.