Chapter XIII: Section XI: Biarritz to Pamplona and Back Via San Sebastian, 155 Miles

(250 KILOMETRES)

DISTANCES ALONG THE ROUTE

Kil. Miles. =Biarritz= to St. Jean de Luz =16= 10 =St. Jean de Luz= to Béhobie (frontier) =10= 6¼ =Béhobie= (frontier) to Vera =15= 9½ =Vera= to Almandoz =37= 23 =Almandoz= to Pamplona =39= 24 =Pamplona= to Tolosa =58= 36 =Tolosa= to San Sebastian =23= 14¼ =San Sebastian= to Fuentarrabia =20= 12¼ =Fuentarrabia= to Béhobie (frontier) =6= 3¾ =Béhobie= (frontier) to Biarritz =26= 16

NOTES FOR DRIVERS

Only those who have cars capable of climbing for many miles up some
exceedingly steep gradients should attempt this little two-day
journey through the Basque Country of Spain to Pamplona. The
surface of the road is very dusty but good between =Biarritz= and
=Béhobie=, and it is rather better and much less dusty from the
frontier to a little beyond =Irurita=. Beyond that the steep
gradients begin, and the surface of the road becomes loose in
places, although it keeps fairly good until the long zigzag ascent
to the =Col de Velate=, a pass among the mountains, 2,717 feet above
sea-level.

_Snow lingers in small patches at this height until April, but
information as to the state of the road can easily be obtained in
Bayonne, Biarritz, or Béhobie, before starting._

There is no need to fear brigands now that a couple of soldiers are
always stationed at the head of the pass.

Beyond the Col de Velate the surface rapidly improves, and becomes
quite good when the steepest part of the descent to Pamplona has
been accomplished.

=Pamplona to San Sebastian.=--This is a good but dusty road, except on the very steep gradients which occur about halfway. There is a very steep and very dangerous winding descent on leaving a long and narrow ravine, but otherwise the descent towards the coast is gentle and continuous.

It is wise to carry provisions in the car for this journey, as the
villages do not cater for visitors or tourists. The _fonda_ at
Sant’ Esteban can provide, however, a most excellent lunch,
although giving only the slightest signs of such a possibility. The
Hôtel la Perla at Pamplona is clean and the food excellent.

PLACES OF INTEREST ON THE ROUTE

=St. Jean de Luz.=--Picturesque town on level ground, with a small
bay, old houses, curious church, and Château de Louis XIV.
Wellington’s headquarters in 1813-1814.

=Béhobie.=--A frontier village by the international bridge over the
Bidassoa.

=Irurita.=--An old and very quaint Spanish town, with several houses
ornamented with the armorial bearings of their noble owners.

=Col de Velate.=--A pass through the Pyrenees at a height of 2,717
feet, guarded by soldiers to prevent brigandage.

=Villava.=--Has the ruins of an ancient convent and some Renaissance
houses.

=Pamplona.=--A large walled city, the capital of Navarre; has no
great attractions beyond its situation, its massive walls, and the
Spanish life of the streets. (1) Cathedral founded in 1397, and
façade rebuilt in 1783; (2) Church of San Nicolás, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries; (3) San Saturnino, a curious building, much
altered since the fourteenth century; (4) the citadel has seen much
fighting, down to the Carlist War of 1875-1876.

=Road to Tolosa.=--Through a long ravine for a great part of the way;
small, scattered villages here and there.

=Tolosa.=--A small town, with dark and narrow streets; Church of
Santa Maria has elaborate classic front.

=San Sebastian.=--A large and very attractive Spanish watering-place,
frequently visited by the King of Spain; citadel, on Mont Orgullo,
is all that remains of the defences of the town, besieged by the
English in the Peninsular War; Churches of Santa Maria, built in
1743, and San Vicente, rebuilt in 1507; modern bull-ring.

=Irun.=--A small town of little interest; the church dates from 1508.

=Fuentarrabia.=--A very quaint old walled town, at the mouth of the
Bidassoa, about 3 kilometres from the main road at Irun.

This section of the tour is a two days’ journey to and from Pamplona, the capital of Navarre. It is recommended on account of the scenery of the passes of the Pyrenees which are traversed rather than for any architectural or archæological interest, beyond the picturesqueness of the houses of the wayside villages.

For the whole time one is either among the Basque people or their neighbours a little to the south, who are sufficiently similar to them to be almost indistinguishable.

THE BASQUES

The Basque people, when unmixed, are a fair people in face and hair, and they are generally regarded as the survivors of the Iberian race which in primitive times occupied Western Europe from Spain to Ireland. Everywhere else they appear to have been absorbed by other races, and by many who have studied the subject have been looked upon as a part of the stock of the modern English, Irish, and Welsh.

Their language is of the agglutinative order, and has been called the despair of philologists, the difficulty of discovering how many of the Basque words have not been assimilated from other tongues being almost insurmountable.

Of the religion of the ancient Basques Dr. Webster declares that no signs remain, their country being without burial tumuli or standing stones, although in the neighbouring areas the tumuli are thickly sown. The early Christian missionaries speak of idols, but no one knows what these were. Although a Roman road penetrates the heart of their country, the Basques were very gradually Christianized, while the Celts, on the contrary, were very susceptible to the new teaching from the East.

The Basques now hold to Roman Catholicism with firmness, and are an industrious, hospitable, and very courteous people, and are not given to excess or extravagance. They also differ from the city-loving Celts, according to Mommsen, in their love of the country. They delight in scattered habitations, and many of the Basque villages have scarcely anything that can be called a street. When they emigrate, it is to South rather than to North America, the Pampas life seeming to attract rather than to repel them. ‘In forty-eight hours after their arrival,’ said a French chargé d’affaires at Montevideo, ‘you will find not a Basque in the town.’ It is very interesting, too, that in South America the dolichocephalic Basques are always regarded as distinct from Spaniards and Frenchmen, the brand of their race being deeper than the superficial signs of their nationality!

It is a rare thing to see a plough in the Basque Country, and the writer has not yet done so. Instead of this ancient labour-saving implement these remarkable people use the _laya_, or two-pronged digging-fork. This curious implement has a handle coming from one side, and is thus in the form of the letter <f>h</f>. One often sees a row of six or seven villagers--men, women, and children--working shoulder to shoulder. All the forks are raised aloft simultaneously, then driven into the soil from the full length of the arm perpendicularly, and when the forks have been driven home with the foot, the soil is turned over like a furrow by the pushing forward of all the forks in a row. In this way a width of ground about eight feet wide, more or less, according to the number of diggers, is _ploughed_ into furrows with wonderful rapidity, for the people work with the greatest energy, which often surprises the stranger, who, on crossing the frontier, expects to enter a land of idlers.

LEAVING BIARRITZ

The road to the main-line station of Biarritz also takes one to the highway for St. Jean de Luz and the Spanish frontier; but there is another route closer to the sea, indicated in the sectional map, which joins the dusty national road near Bidart, and, being shorter and less frequented, is worth consideration, although there are one or two places where one needs to go slowly in order to take the right turning.

ST. JEAN DE LUZ

is a quaint and attractive little town on flat ground almost level with the sea at the mouth of the Nivelle. There is also an oval bay protected by breakwaters.

In the town there are several picturesque half-timbered houses with upper stories projecting on carved wooden corbels, and in the main street is the very typical Basque church of St. Jean Baptiste, in which Louis XIV. was married to the Infanta Marie-Thérèse of Spain on June 9, 1660. The interior suggests a spacious concert-hall or theatre rather than a church, for it is an aisleless structure with three tiers of black oak galleries fixed against the walls one above the other. The men, in accordance with the Basque custom, occupy the

A sketch at Sant’ Esteban. (_Page 207._)]

galleries, while the women have the great surface of rather dusty wooden floor to themselves.

Just where it is necessary to turn to the left to get to the bridge the square-turreted _Château de Louis XIV._, built by Louis XIII., stands overlooking a wide _place_. The _Mairie_, built in 1657, contains the act of marriage of Louis XIV., and the _Maison de l’Infante_, on the quay, is shown as the house where the royal bride stayed before her wedding; it contains a painting of the ceremony by Gérôme.

No. 2, Rue Mazarin, behind the Maison de l’Infante, was occupied by Wellington when he had his headquarters in the town from November 17, 1813, to February 20, 1814, after defeating Soult at the Battle of the Nivelle. In this time of inactivity, while preparations were being made for investing Bayonne, the life in St. Jean de Luz is thus sketched by Colonel Hill James:

‘A gay little town was St. Jean de Luz in those days, when a pack
of English foxhounds successfully drew the neighbouring woods,
followed by a brilliant field of the boldest spirits of the day.
Lord Wellington encouraged the sport by constantly appearing at the
meets, wearing his favourite Salisbury Hunt livery of sky-blue with
black cape. The Basque inhabitants flocked to see this novel sport,
undismayed by their warlike surroundings; for the manly, honest,
and straightforward conduct of the strangers had reassured them,
and they had returned to their homes to court the presence and
protection of the British Army, which paid with a liberal hand in
good coin for all it required.’

As long ago as 1520 Basque ships sailed from St. Jean de Luz to fish off the coast of Newfoundland, and as pioneers in this enterprise one can feel the fullest sympathy for the tenacity with which the French have held to their fishery rights on that part of the American coast.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries St. Jean prospered exceedingly, although in 1588 the Spaniards had succeeded in burning the town, in revenge for the many things they had suffered at the hands of the Basque corsairs who lived at the mouth of the Nivelle.

When the Duke of Buckingham was endeavouring to assist the Huguenots of La Rochelle in their desperate resistance to the huge forces brought against it by Richelieu, St. Jean de Luz sent fifty ships to the help of the garrison of the Île de Rhé, which had been blockaded by the English fleet, and Buckingham, having failed in his final assault, was forced to sail homewards and leave the Protestant town to fight the whole forces of France. It held out for fifteen months, capitulating in October, 1628.

The pretty village of Urrugne, with its curious classic church, stands close to the foot-hills of the mountain chain which almost touches the sea at this point.

The curves of the road give beautiful views over the sea--a lovely blue flecked with breaking waves--and the green valleys dotted with white houses between the bare, buff-coloured mountain ridges.

BÉHOBIE (the Franco-Spanish frontier village)

In the little street of this village on the Bidassoa one must come to a halt at the sentry-box by the international bridge, where the official enters particulars of the car in a book, salutes, and allows one to cross the river. On the other side Spanish officials direct one to turn to the right to reach the Customs-house, where, if all arrangements have been made at home, it is only necessary to produce the _triptique_, and pay a small sum, according to one’s destination and the amount of petrol in the tank, which is calculated by depth only, and not capacity!

When the officials are satisfied, one is free to go where one chooses without any more trouble; but before leaving Béhobie it is worth while to look at the Île des Faisans, an island in the Bidassoa famous for the meetings and conferences it has witnessed. The most memorable are the meeting of Louis XI. and Henry IV. of Castile in 1463, the farewell of François to his two sons on their way to Spain as hostages in 1526, and the meeting in 1565 between Charles IX. and Catherine de Medici with her daughter Elizabeth, wife of Philip II. of Spain.

‘Their majesties of France,’ says an old chronicler, ‘having heard
through Monsieur d’Orléans that the Queen of Spain was to cross the
river which separateth the two kingdoms on the South, dined full
early, and, straightway after dinner, they set off for this same
river, adjoining the which they caused leafy bowers to be builded,
about two leagues distant from St. Jehan de Luz; where they, having
come, waited some two hours for her approach in a heat so
desperate, that five or six soldiers of Strozzi’s troops died,
suffocated in their armour. At last, towards two o’clock, the Court
of the Queen was beheld drawing near, then the Queen-Mother, seized
with a great joy, crossed the river, and found herself face to face
with her whom she had so long desired.’

In 1660 Louis XIV. met his future bride at Béhobie, and a great pavilion was put up for their reception. It was decorated by Velasquez, who caught a fever there, and died shortly after his return to Madrid.

The first turning to the left after crossing the bridge over the Bidassoa is taken, and for several miles the road follows the river in a narrowing valley.

_At the bridge where the road takes to the right bank of the river there is a charge of 5 pesetas made for automobiles._

The scenery becomes more mountainous every mile, but the road keeps fairly level as it winds through the steep-sided ravine of the Bidassoa. The shiny foliage of box trees and bushes clothes the precipitous ascents in a dark green garment, threadbare in places where the woodman has been at work, and the rough banks by the roadside are in spring starred with primroses growing among mosses, penny-pies, and withered ferns of the previous year. The lonely houses now and then to be seen in the valley are of the same type all the way to Pamplona. They have low-pitched, brown-tiled roofs with a very wide overhang at the gables, shading a quaint balcony at one end. The woodwork is often painted green or brown, and the building is almost invariably whitewashed, leaving a margin of red stone showing round windows and doors and at each corner. Where there are any chimneys, they are of the diminutive type one finds in Italy. The shutters are often plain and solid, and of different colours.

Vera is the first village of a series. They are all small, the Basques, as already mentioned, disliking anything but hamlets, and all are of great picturesqueness. In general character they are very similar, each having, besides its wide-eaved balconied houses, a rushing stream crossed by a simple stone bridge half grown over with ivy, one or two bullock-carts, with a few men whose clean-shaven faces and regular, almost handsome, features seem too good to be true, a simple church, and possibly a military-looking personage in a brilliant uniform at the door of one of the houses.

The bullock-carts are often of the most primitive type, with spokeless wheels, such as one associates with the chariots of prehistoric man! Close to the _fonda_ at Sant’ Esteban there is a smithy where the bullocks are shod. As the beasts do not stand quietly during the operation, they are slung in the wooden framework shown in the accompanying illustration, their knees resting on brackets and their hind-legs stretched out over a bar. They seem to rest quite comfortably on the broad girths by which they are suspended.

Those who visit Spain should remember that _fonda_ means inn, and also that, in villages where there is no sign of the word on any of the houses, there may nevertheless be an inn of a simple character where a modest meal can be obtained.

Of the _fonda_ at Sant’ Esteban the writer can speak with recent experience of the excellent lunch of three or four courses, including an appetizing omelette, which was prepared in a short quarter of an hour for five hungry travellers. The waitress was a little girl of about fourteen, whose dignified manner gave a finish to the meal, especially when she insisted on removing the tablecloth before placing the dessert and wine on the old mahogany table.

Legasa is the next village. It has the usual features and conspicuously pretty children.

Narvate is very quaint, with its wide green balconies and the carved stone panels in the walls of the larger houses, revealing the heraldic dignities of the owners.

Gorse is abundant, and in some of the villages one sees fences made of thin slabs of stone placed upright on their edges in exactly the same fashion as in the Lake District of England.

At the little town of Irurita, where coats of arms and carved wooden brackets are numerous, the road from Bayonne is joined, and almost immediately afterwards the road begins a long winding ascent among steep hillsides covered here and there with short beeches.

The haystacks are built round a central pole, as one sees them all over Italy, and the gates into the fields are of that awkward type which consists of several loose bars or thin poles dropped one above the other between two uprights placed close together at each side of the opening in the hedge or stone wall.

Climbing steadily, one is soon high above the green valley, with its string of villages just passed through, and the views become increasingly mountainous and austere. Great serrated ridges form the horizon, and naked rocks show above the road on the left. The villages become more scattered, and soon after Almandoz there is a vast solitude of precipitous ascents covered with low beech-trees, until the bare crags and peaks, whitened here and there with patches of snow, stand out against the clear sky and the drifting clouds.

From this point to the head of the Col de Velate the surface of the road is loose, and in places furrowed with running water, and the gradients become very steep, with sharp curves which necessitate careful driving, but a 12 to 15

Wellington besieged the town in 1813, and took it alter a brief resistance. (_Page 210._)]

horse-power car of a recent type can make the ascent very easily.

The head of the pass (2,717 feet above the sea) is guarded by two soldiers, whose presence is sufficient to keep off brigands. A suspicion of adventure is given to the tour at this point in the visible evidence that, but for these two cloaked figures, bearing modern rifles, a group of reckless and fully armed banditti might appear at any corner of the road and reduce the harmless tourist to a penniless condition.

A picturesque diligence that travels by this road is drawn by three mules abreast, with another leading. Besides this one seldom meets anything but the local vehicles of the villages. There are opportunities of seeing a number of rare birds, if one is lucky, and has time to linger in the solitude of the pass.[G]

Masses of conglomerate rock are passed on beginning the descent, and the evening light falls on great slopes covered with beech. The road gradually improves as the descent towards the plain is made. More quaint villages are passed, dogs bark, and carts are met drawn by five or six mules in a long line.

Before reaching Pamplona, the sun sets behind a jagged ridge of blue mountains fringed with fluffy golden clouds, and the villages begin to show specks of brightness from a distance, for all are lighted with electricity, owing to the cheap power which is supplied by dozens of mountain torrents and streams.

Villata has an old bridge, a ruined convent, a small river falling over a dam, and a main street of tall houses, some of them ornamented with classic sculpture. It also has a notice warning cars to reduce speed. Soon afterwards an avenue of trees dignifies the road as one approaches

PAMPLONA

From the exterior, the lofty walls, the citadel and bastions of the city, with the towers of its cathedral and churches rising above, set in an amphitheatre of mountains, make a most attractive picture, but within there is a want of antiquity which is disappointing. There are no streets of old houses, and the churches lack, to some extent, the spirit of romance, although one of them dates back to the twelfth century.

_The Cathedral_ was founded in 1397 on the site of an older building, and the façade was built in 1783. The interior has three naves and richly carved choir stalls dating from 1530. In the south transept the doorway leading to the cloisters, of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, has a carved tympanum showing the death of Mary. It is painted and gilded, and is a very beautiful example of late fourteenth-century work.

_The Chapel of Santa Cruz_, in the south-west corner of the building, has an iron fence made of the chains which surrounded the tent of the Emir at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. The tomb of Charles III. and his wife, Leonor of Castile, has been taken from the choir to the old kitchen of the canons.

_The Church of San Nicolás_, in the Paseo de Valencia, is an interesting building of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

_San Saturnino_ has been restored and altered a great deal since the fourteenth century, and is now a curious building containing a dreadful atmosphere of human decay, the wooden floor being almost entirely composed of numbered trap-doors leading into the vaults beneath. On this dusty floor the ‘devout’ kneel to repeat prayers in front of little altars and shrines, and seem to disregard the pestilential odours of the dead, which make the church intolerable for more than a few minutes. Perhaps the dirt and the smell are regarded somewhat after the manner of a penance, although the Roman Church, which inclines to a monetary basis for all the forms of absolution it dispenses, would be hardly likely to give it any recognition. Before hurrying out of the building the large representation of an armed knight in low relief high up on one of the walls should be noticed. The north door has a fine carving of the Last Judgment.

_The Citadel_ is a great star-shaped fort at the south-west corner of the city’s defences, which have been attacked at different times down to the Carlist War of 1875-1876, when the city endured several bombardments without the Carlists being able to gain an entry.

In 1521 Pamplona was besieged by the French, and a young Spanish captain named Iñigo Lopez de Recalde was wounded near the gate of San Nicolás. During his convalescence he planned the rules of the Order of the Jesuits, and became their first vicar-general, being known after his death as St. Ignatius de Loyola. Near the gateway a chapel was, in 1691, erected to the memory of the founder of the Jesuits.

In spite of its formidable defences, Wellington besieged Pamplona in 1813, after his victory at Vittoria, and took it after a brief resistance.

PAMPLONA TO SAN SEBASTIAN

Leaving by the gateway called the Puerta Nueva, one crosses the River Arga, and goes north-westward on a level dusty road. The city, with its double tier of ramparts and its church towers, soon becomes a distant object in the narrow plain set about with blue mountain peaks. On getting closer to the rocky heights the crumpled and distorted stratification becomes visible, as well as the intrusive masses of pale grey rock.

All the level ground is under cultivation, and the Basque method of digging with the _laya_ can be frequently seen, for the Navarrais of the northern half of the province of Navarre scarcely differ at all from the Basques, and have the same language and physique. In the southern half of the province the people speak Spanish, and have the same characteristics and the same failings as the Spaniards.

A few rather dilapidated villages are passed, and then a road to the right is taken. It leads at once straight up to a narrow cleft in a great glacis of forbidding grey rock. It almost takes one’s breath away to approach such a natural fortress in a car, but the road is encouraging, and one drives through the yawning portal into a narrow ravine, where a noisy stream of very green water rushes among boulders just below the road. Every few minutes it seems as though there can be no way out of the gorge, and that the road will either run into a quarry or a tunnel, but a fresh bend always shows a good stretch of road in front. Holly and beech grow on the precipitous slopes, and teasels and Christmas roses are passed. A rabbit is never seen, but sometimes a few sheep appear among the rocks.

A notice-board warns the driver of a big descent with a rough surface and hairpin corners and views of distant mountains, after which the road continues in a ravine for several miles, descending always. There are a few more villages, but little chance of a good _déjeuner_ before reaching Tolosa. The valley gradually opens out a little, the scenery becomes tamed with agriculture, and soon after the road has turned towards the north one enters

TOLOSA

It is a small town with two narrow, shadowy streets running parallel and quite close together, with a collection of new houses with bright red roofs, and some cloth and paper mills scattered promiscuously outside the old nucleus. The Church of Santa Maria, passed on the right, has an elaborately ornamental classic front, and the interior decorated with local marble.

At the village of Andoain there is a fork where the turning to the left is taken, and a beautiful road follows a river to Lascarte, where one goes to the right for San Sebastian, passing a number of factories, and then coming out to a delicious view of great green waves foaming on to the rocks of the bay of

SAN SEBASTIAN

It is a fashionable seaside town, with wide modern streets, containing little to interest the visitor beyond the smartly dressed people, the shops, and the chances of seeing the youthful King of Spain or other members of European royal families. The picturesque bay, with the rocky Isle of Santa Clara and the mountainous coast-line, make San Sebastian a most attractive place. The season is from June to October, when inland towns are being baked under a fierce sun.

The old town, besieged in 1813 by Wellington’s army, and occupying a peninsula between the mouth of the Urumea and the bay, had had its fortifications removed by 1865, so that there is little to remind one of the siege of Napoleonic times. All who go there should, however, read a detailed account of the investment which Wellington entrusted to General Sir Thomas Graham. The garrison, under General Rey, made such a successful resistance to the first assault that the allied forces were obliged to retire, but a few weeks later Graham returned, and finally took the citadel on Mont Orgullo. The English and Spanish soldiers were accused of reckless sacking and plundering when they captured San Sebastian, but it is difficult to find the truth of the matter. One thing that is definitely known is the fact that Wellington complained so much of the plundering of the Spanish troops that he even sent them back from the front as he approached the Adour.

The citadel on Mont Orgullo cannot be entered without permission, but anyone may climb up the hill to the English cemetery, where the British officers who fell in the attacks on the town were buried.

The Church of Santa Maria was built in 1743, and San Vicente, rebuilt in 1507, has a reredos of gilded wood dated 1584.

A large modern bull-ring is conspicuous on the hill on the east side of the river. It is highly interesting to visit this twentieth-century amphitheatre, and to see the elaborately fitted operating-room where the wounded toreador, a victim of Spanish decadence, can receive immediate treatment. There is also a small chapel in which the bull’s antagonist can receive the Sacrament before he goes out to the dangerous encounter.

At Irun, which need not delay one, there is a turning to the left leading down to the very picturesque little walled town of Fuentarrabia, at the mouth of the Bidassoa. It is difficult to take a motor through the narrow streets, and it is therefore wiser to leave the car outside the quaint gateway.

Wellington’s army crossed the mouth of the Bidassoa in October, 1813, the men wading through the water at low tide with their rifles held above their heads. Soult expected that the English would cross at Vera, eight miles up the river, the bridge at Béhobie having been destroyed, and being unaware of the ford among the sandbanks, which was known to the Basque fishermen.