France
Espelette
Red peppers drying on every white façade — a Basque village wearing its spice outside.
Every white façade wears a string of red. Espelette, in the French Basque Country, dries its peppers on the outside of its Basque houses, and in late summer and autumn the whole village turns crimson — a living larder hung in the sun. The air carries a sweet, gently smoky warmth that sits somewhere between capsicum and chocolate.
Espelette is the Basque village as you imagine it — white houses, red-and-green timbers, a church with its galleried interior — and it is the home of the piment d'Espelette, the only spice in France to hold an appellation of origin. The peppers are picked from late summer into autumn and strung on the house fronts to dry, which is when the village is at its reddest, and the pepper festival in late October fills the streets with growers, cooks and the brotherhood that guards the name. The piment goes into everything in Basque cooking — piperade, axoa, the cured ham, the chocolate: the Antton chocolaterie in the village makes a chilli chocolate that has become the thing to take home. The village walks end to end in a quarter of an hour, but the food shops will keep you the afternoon.
Couple
A single morning's exploration — photograph the pepper-draped façades, taste the chilli chocolate at Antton, buy a string of dried piment to bring home. Small, colourful and specific enough to count as your own find.
Family
Children respond to the spectacle of an entire village turned red. The pepper-chocolate combination is an easy sell, and the late-October festival adds a street party to the visit.
- Every façade is draped with strings of drying red peppers in autumn — the village wears its identity on its walls.
- The Espelette pepper has its own appellation — the only spice in France with one — and the October festival celebrates it.
- The village chocolatier infuses its chocolate with piment d'Espelette — sweet heat that does not exist elsewhere.
- Small enough to cross in fifteen minutes but rich enough in food shops to fill an afternoon.
Poulet basquaise — chicken braised with Espelette pepper, tomatoes, sweet peppers and Bayonne ham.
Chilli chocolate spiked with piment d'Espelette from Antton, the village chocolatier.
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