Saint-Jean-de-Luz: The Church Where Louis XIV Married

Required Activities

• Walk the rue Gambetta along the old south wall — the only part of the medieval church still standing — and find the doorway cut in 1650 and bricked up around 1669 so that nobody could marry through it again; the town archives never recorded whether the parish did that itself or was told to

• Count your way across the altarpiece: eighteen saints, two allegories, the dove of the Holy Spirit, God the Father and the pelican, set round a double-drum tabernacle between twisted columns — it took five cartloads to bring it from Bayonne in 1669

• Stand in the nave and work out the old seating: until the 1970s the three tiers of galleries were for men only and the floor was for the women, each of whom set her chair on her family's jarleku, the grave slab that belonged to her house — the galleries you are looking at were rebuilt identically in 1857 with help from Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie

• Step back from the 35 m bell tower and notice that it has no spire, only a low flat tiled roof: lightning set the old one alight on 27 November 1706, the bells were saved by wrapping them in wet ships' sails, and the temporary tiled cap put on afterwards is still there

• Hunt along the west and south walls for the leftovers of the 15th-century Gothic church — a pier, stone ribs, blocked windows, and high on the south wall three worked windows with coussièges, stone benches facing each other inside the embrasure — then find the altar frontal embroidered with tiny coloured glass beads, said to be Louis XIV's wedding gift to the church