Biarritz

Biarritz is one of those rare towns where two entirely different eras of glamour stacked directly on top of each other without either one erasing the other. There’s the nineteenth-century imperial resort, all striped bathing tents and grand hotels, and there’s the surf culture that arrived a century later and never left, and somehow the combination works better than it has any right to.

Empress Eugénie’s seaside whim

Biarritz was a modest whaling and fishing village until Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III and herself from nearby Spain, had a villa built on the beach in 1854 — a building that today, much expanded, is the Hôtel du Palais, still the town’s grandest address. Her regular summer visits turned Biarritz almost overnight into the fashionable resort of European royalty; Queen Victoria came, as did assorted Russian grand dukes and Spanish nobility, all chasing the same sea air and mild winters that had drawn the English inland to Pau. Walking the clifftop path past the Hôtel du Palais at golden hour, its cream facade and red-tiled roof catching the last light over the Atlantic, it’s easy to see exactly what convinced an empress to build a palace on a fishing village’s beach.

The waves that made it France’s surf capital

The other Biarritz origin story is more recent and, to me, more fun: in 1956, the American screenwriter Peter Viertel arrived to work on a film and brought a surfboard with him, becoming the first person to surf the Côte des Basques break — and inadvertently founding continental Europe’s surf culture on the spot. Nearly seventy years later, Biarritz’s beaches, particularly the Côte des Basques and the Grande Plage, host a genuinely serious surf scene, with international competitions, a cluster of surf schools, and a town personality that swings between grand-hotel elegance and salt-crusted wetsuits without seeming to notice the contradiction. Lia took a lesson on a blustery October morning while I watched from the seawall with a coffee, and even from dry land the size of the swell rolling in off the open Atlantic made it obvious why the sport took hold here rather than somewhere calmer.

When to go: September and October give you the best surf conditions and warm water without the peak-summer crowds; if you’re chasing the Belle Époque atmosphere over the waves, a crisp, quiet winter weekend at the Hôtel du Palais has its own kind of appeal.