The Corniche Basque: Flysch Cliffs Between Socoa and Hendaye

Required Activities

• Drive the RD912 from where it crosses the Untxin, up onto the pointe de Socoa 24m above the water, then past the cove called the viviers basques, Haizabia, the Abbadia estate and the baie de Lohia down to Hendaye-Plage

• Walk the inland alternative over the first line of hills — the historic clifftop path is closed — and from the ridge look down on the tilted flysch beds and the coves cut into them, as far as the Maison de la Corniche at Asporotsttipi where the path onto the Abbadia estate begins

• Walk the path across the 65 hectares of the Domaine d'Abbadia, passing its three houses — Asporotsttipi, Nekatoenea and Larretxea — and climb to the château-observatoire on top of it, the house Antoine d'Abbadie commissioned from Viollet-le-Duc in 1864 after his years in Ethiopia

• Take binoculars and look one to two kilometres straight out from the corniche for the Belharra reef, a shoal 14 to 18 m down that throws up waves of up to 20 m on a big winter swell — on the days it works, this is where people come to watch the surfers on it

• Finish on the beach at Hendaye and walk back out to the pointe Sainte-Anne to find the concrete the German army left when it built the Corniche into the Atlantic Wall — the eastern end of a line of works that runs all the way back to the pointe de Socoa