Fotógrafos en El País Vasco francés

The French Basque Country packs four completely different backdrops into forty minutes of driving. Espelette is the one people picture: white houses with ox-blood timbers and shutters, and from late August into October, curtains of red peppers hung to dry across the fronts. It is a working crop with its own protected name, not decoration, and the strings come down after the pepper festival at the end of October — outside that window the village is still handsome, but the walls are bare. Ainhoa, ten minutes south, is a single long street of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century houses with dated lintels and painted timbers, a pelota wall beside the church, and almost nobody once the coach parties have moved on. Saint-Jean-de-Luz is the coast: a bay closed by three breakwaters so the water inside stays flat, a crescent of sand under the seafront houses, a working fishing harbour with Ciboure on the far quay, and the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, dark and gold under three tiers of wooden galleries, where Louis XIV married the Spanish Infanta in 1660. Biarritz is fifteen minutes up the coast and has its own page; this one stays in the bay and inland. The fourth backdrop is La Rhune, 905 metres of grass and bracken on the Spanish border, reached by a wooden rack railway that has climbed from the Col de Saint-Ignace since 1924 at walking pace, past pottok ponies and manech sheep, to a summit that looks down the whole coast. The train runs roughly from spring to early November and sells out in season — check the timetable and the summit forecast, because cloud can sit on the ridge all day while the coast is clear. Best months: June, then September into October, when the peppers are up and the Atlantic light is at its softest.