Pau: A Free Funicular and a King's Birthplace

Required Activities

• Ride the funicular between the station and the Boulevard des Pyrénées, free since 1978 and running every five minutes — 103 metres of track, 26 metres of rise, a gradient of 30 per cent — and on the way find the arms of Pau on the side of the car and the art nouveau lower station; the Touring club de France called this "a horror of scrap iron hung in the air" when it opened in 1908, and it has been a protected monument since 2023

• Walk the 980 m of the Boulevard des Pyrénées from the château gates to the Palais Beaumont, laid out between 1893 and 1899 because Alphand judged that Pau lacked a Promenade des Anglais of its own, and use the named viewing table to pick the Pic du Midi d'Ossau out of the chain — then decide whether Lamartine was right that Pau is the finest land view as Naples is the finest sea view

• In the chambre du roi at the Château de Pau, find the sea-turtle shell said to have been Henri IV's first cradle — rediscovered in the 18th century, venerated until the Revolution, when a copy of it was burned publicly in 1793 while the real one was hidden — then note that this is not where he was born: Louis XVIII and Louis-Philippe had the room arranged around the shell, and the birth itself appears to have taken place on the first floor of the south wing

• Walk the medieval castelnau from the château gates eastward along the spur, with the gave below you to the south and the Hédas ravine to the north, and find the two edges that hemmed the town in: the 250 m line where the first wall went up from 1384, and the Hédas itself, which stopped the town growing north until it was bridged in the middle of the 17th century. Finish at the statue of Henri IV on the place Royale, unveiled in 1843.