The Pyrenees: The Basque Coast to Carcassonne

Take a lesson on the long, slow wave of the Côte des Basques, the beach where Peter Viertel left his board behind after filming The Sun Also Rises — and check the cord round your ankle, because the leash was worked out here by Georges Hennebutte, one of the young men who learned on this beach alongside the founder of France's first surf shop and its first surf school

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

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

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

Ride the 1924 train the 4.2 km up from the col de Saint-Ignace — thirty-five minutes at about 8 km/h on a Strub rack holding a gradient of 250 mm per metre — and inside the carriage find the varnished Ardèche chestnut panelling and count the six compartments of ten seats

Climb the Rue de la Citadelle from the Porte Saint-Jacques, reading the carved door lintels in the pink Arradoy sandstone that give each house its name and date, then follow the access ramp to the citadel's west demi-lune for the view over the town and the basin of Cize

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

Find the Houn Salade, the salt fountain, on the Place du Bayaà where the town began, and walk the old lanes round it picking out the half-timbered houses with their upper floors jettied out over the street

Walk the full 1.66 km of Navarrenx's wall, 10 m high and packed behind with earth, and find on the way the four bastions copied from the citadel of Lucca, the demi-lune, the watch turrets and the mouths of the countermine galleries under them

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 line past the Grotto of Massabielle, where in 1858 Bernadette Soubirous said she saw a lady the local clergy identified as the Virgin Mary — the Church recognised the apparitions in 1862 — and touch the rock as the pilgrims ahead of you do; about 20,000 people a day pass this rock in the pilgrimage season

Take the waters at Cauterets, then walk the town looking for what the water built: the monumental 19th-century fronts of the Thermes de César, the Grand hôtel d'Angleterre and the Grand hôtel Continental. The village itself began as a cluster of huts around one pool, the bain d'en-haut, which the abbot of Saint-Savin had built between 1059 and 1078; Gaston Fébus came here in 1380 to treat his deafness.

Walk the valley-floor path from Gavarnie village to the Hôtel du Cirque at about 1,570 m, the building at the foot of the wall that marks the end of the easy ground — on foot, or on a horse or donkey hired in the village in season — and note where the second route into the cirque comes down, the Échelle des Sarradets on the rim above you

Walk in to the Sarradets refuge the normal way, from the col des Tentes over the port de Boucharo on the border and round under the cliffs, rather than up the échelle des Sarradets out of the cirque, which is the steep route — and finish over the col des Sarradets at 2,589 m with the Brèche directly above you

Ride the cable car up from La Mongie, changing at the Taoulet station on its own 2,341 m summit, and look up at the two track cables held apart by cavaliers — the only arrangement of its kind in France, which lets this line run in 70 km/h winds where others stop at 50, and buys the summit 35 more working days a year; on the second stage, count the pylons, because there is only one, a hundred metres short of the top

Walk right round the Lac d'Aumar, the largest natural lake in the reserve at 25 hectares, then work out from the shorelines which of its neighbours are natural and which are dammed — Aubert, Orédon and Cap-de-Long were all raised for hydroelectricity from 1882 onwards

Cross the col at about 1,490 m and do it from the harder side if you are on a bike: twelve kilometres at 6.6 per cent up from the fork outside Arreau, against 12.85 km at under 5 per cent from the church at Sainte-Marie-de-Campan — and on the western side notice where the easy run past Payolle ends and the road starts switchbacking through conifers at 8 to 9 per cent, on a pass the Tour de France has used 78 times

Drive or cycle the 420 m of natural tunnel on the D119, which runs alongside the Arize for 410 m under a roof averaging 50 m wide — one of only a handful of caves in Europe a car can pass through, the other being the Cuevona in Asturias

Climb the rock to the castle from the town, passing the two gatehouses and the barbican that guard the approach on the Saint-Girons side, then go up all five vaulted floors of the round tower, 34 m of it with walls four metres thick — and notice from inside that the rooms are hexagonal even though the tower is round, and that no defensive tower here has an opening below the first floor

In the apse of the cathedral of Saint-Lizier find the 12th-century frescoes uncovered in 1960, attributed to the workshop of the Master of Pedret, a Catalan painter who worked over the mountains in the Pallars and the Val d'Aran, and the 13th-century Christ in majesty in the half-dome above them

Walk the full circuit of the lices, the corridor between the two walls, and work out where the 112 workers' houses stood that filled it in the 19th century when the towers were being used as garages and sheds and the walls were being quarried for stone — the demolition of the whole Cité was already scheduled when Jean-Pierre Cros-Mayrevieille stopped it