Bayonne: Cathedral, Ham and the Cradle of French Chocolate

Required Activities

• Walk the 13th-century cloister on the south side of Bayonne's rayonnant Gothic cathedral, on the World Heritage list since 1998 as part of the Santiago routes in France, and find two things Victor Hugo saw there: the great portal that once opened from the cloister into the choir and is now bricked up and whitewashed, and the mutilated stone sarcophagi still fixed to the wall, all of them empty

• Drink a hot chocolate under the arcades of the rue Port-Neuf in Grand Bayonne, a street that was a canal until the 17th century and whose houses still stand on piles, then cross the Adour to Saint-Esprit, where the Portuguese Sephardic families who brought chocolate to Bayonne in the 16th century actually lived, and find the hôtel Loustau, built at the end of the 18th century entirely on oak piles

• Walk the rampart path round Petit Bayonne, which Vauban enclosed inside his fortifications, and find the porte de Mousserolles, the one surviving gate of that wall; then cross into Grand Bayonne and follow the boulevard du rempart Lachepaillet, laid along the line of the town ditch that had already dried up by the 12th century, picking out where François I's work stops and Vauban's begins

• At a stall in the Halles de Bayonne, find a whole leg still on the bone and read the two marks burnt into it — the consortium's seal, without which it may not be called jambon de Bayonne at all, and the date it went into the salt, which tells you how long past the seven-month minimum it has hung. Ask for the salt to be named: it comes only from the springs at Salies-de-Béarn. Then taste it against a supermarket slice and say which is which.