Guided tour of St-Jean-Pied-de-Port

Following our free time, we met at the Tourist Office for a guided tour. Our guide, Florence, was born in Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and has strong connections to the town. Like most people she moved away for a while, but has been back for many years. The first thing she showed us was the house, right next to the Tourist Office, where her father and grandfather were born. The property is still in the family and is now shared with her siblings. Half of it is a museum and the other half houses a restaurant. Florence now lives outside the old city in one of the suburbs about 5 minutes away.

We entered through the old gate, where Florence explained the seven regions of the Pays (country) Basque; four are in Spain and three are in France, but all are united by a common cultural identity. We then moved onto the 14th century red schist (slate) Gothic church, Notre-Dame-du-Bout-du-Pont, which is on the cobbled rue de La Citadelle near the Porte d’Espagne, which leads to the bridge that crosses the river Nive. We had a quick walk around the church and Florence pointed out that when the parishioners attended church back in the day, the men sat downstairs while the women had to sit upstairs in the cheap seats!

After this, we walked up the steep cobbled rue de La Citadelle to the 15th century Porte St-Jacques, with Florence pointing out some of the interesting houses, including the way that the old occupants’ names were chiseled into the stone above the doors. We continued to climb to the top of the hill to the Citadel, which was remodelled by Vauban, an architect of note in the 17th century, to double it’s capacity. It is currently an affluent private school. Florence told us that when she was a teenager, she and some of her friends cut through bars to a tunnel under the Citadel - then a military installation- and tried to explore it, but once they had got some way in were frightened by a loud noise and ran back out and away. We had great views out over the village and surrounding districts from up here.

We then descended to the still intact ramparts and walked the length of them back to where we had started the tour.Les mer