Espelette, Ainhoa and Cambo: Red Peppers, a Labourdine Village and Rostand's Villa

Required Activities

• Find all three forms the AOC allows at Espelette, the only spice in France with a protected appellation: whole fresh peppers, a corde of between twenty and a hundred strung together, and the ground powder, and buy the form you would actually use

• Walk Ainhoa's single street and work out which two buildings survived the Thirty Years' War: the church and the maison Machitorenea. Everything else is 17th-century Labourdine rebuild, and the pelota fronton at the end leans against the churchyard wall

• Go room by room through Arnaga and name the style Rostand gave each one, English in the hall, Chinese in the smoking room, Empire in the study, Louis XVI in the dining room, and find in the library the Cesar Gerard Depardieu won for Cyrano in 1991 and gave to the museum

• Walk the long canal of Arnaga's French garden to the pergola at the far end, copied from the monument that closes the view at Schonbrunn, and find the three poets named on the trellis of the Coin des poetes facing the orangery