Biarritz to San Sebastián. The road trip Europe has been keeping quiet.
Curated by OB Private, Crafted for You
There is a stretch of Atlantic coastline where France begins to loosen its collar. The grand hotels are still there, the Burgundy is still excellent and the food markets are still immaculate. But so are surfboards, bare feet, bicycles and people who have arranged their entire day around the tide.
The road trip goes like this: fly into Biarritz, drive north to Hossegor, then turn south again through the tiny surf village of Guéthary and across the Spanish border into San Sebastián. It is not a long trip, nowhere is ever very far away, but the landscape, food and atmosphere seem to change every hour.
Start in Biarritz. Drop your bags and walk to Les Halles, the city’s covered market, where the correct first lunch is six oysters and a glass of white wine for around €9. You will order another six.
That evening, make a plan for De Puta Madre – a restaurant where dinner takes place in a garden, by candlelight, surrounded by tomatoes and beans and flowers, with the kitchen visible through glass as chefs cook over charcoal. It feels less like a formal restaurant than an extraordinarily good dinner party unfolding in someone’s kitchen garden. If there is a Meursault from Antoine Jobard on the wine list, order it.
Then drive north.
Hossegor is perhaps the closest Europe gets to Byron Bay. Pine forests rather than palms, but otherwise the comparison is not entirely fanciful. Everyone surfs. Everyone cycles. Boards are strapped to bikes, wetsuits dry on fences, and there is remarkably little pressure to be anywhere at any particular time.
This is where the trip should slow down. Unpack for a few days at La Maison du Lac – a house among the pines on Hossegor’s marine lake, in that rather perfect sliver between the calm water and the Atlantic beyond. There is a shed full of surfboards, skateboards and beach chairs, bikes for getting around, and a signed surfboard that hints at some of the serious surfers who have passed through.
Within a day, the car starts to feel redundant.
You wake up and see what the water is doing. Someone takes a paddleboard onto the lake. Someone else cycles into town for coffee. Later you pile things into the buggy and head for the ocean.
One morning worth having: walk around the lake to Chez Jérôme, an oyster shack that has been there since 1997. The oysters arrive without ceremony, plump and nutty, eaten with your feet almost at lake level. Follow it with the Wednesday market, coffee at Green Cantine and an afternoon that could go either way.
When it is eventually time to leave for Spain, stop first at Guéthary – a 1960s surf village that appears to have escaped modernisation entirely. Go to Providence and sit overlooking the sea. Order the granola bowl and a flat white.
Then cross the border into San Sebastián.
San Sebastián is a city where eating becomes an endurance sport. There are Michelin stars everywhere and tasting menus that require months of forward planning. Our favourite meal was at Bar Nestor, where only one tortilla is made each day and once it is gone, it is gone. Get there at 5.30pm. Join the queue. Once inside, there is almost nothing to decide. Tortilla if you are lucky. Tomatoes. Padrón peppers. Sirloin steak. A very good Ribera del Duero for €3 a glass. The entire bill was approximately €97. It was the best meal we ate.
The final meal before the drive back to Biarritz Airport is at Ekaitza – two Michelin stars, overlooking the harbour at Ciboure. It is worth doing precisely because, two days earlier, you were standing at a bar counter eating tortilla and drinking a €3 glass of wine. The two experiences are not in competition. They explain one another.
Over the course of the trip you will have eaten oysters in a covered market, turbot cooked over charcoal in a kitchen garden, oysters at a wooden lake shack, granola above the surf, a Michelin-starred lunch overlooking a harbour and steak at a bar in the old town of San Sebastián. There is no need to choose between high and low, polished and barefoot. The Basque Country is unusually good at all of it.
Although after a few days at La Maison du Lac, it may be the simplest image that lingers longest: a bicycle leaning outside, boards waiting in the shed and the Atlantic somewhere beyond the pines.
