Bayonne Without the Party: Chocolate, Ham and a Moved River

It is February, and the red scarves are still on the balconies. They hang from the wrought-iron railings of Petit Bayonne all year — tied in late summer, faded by autumn, part of the buildings now. Below them the covered market opens early: a cured leg swings on its hook, stamped with a small Basque cross, while the counter man shaves slices off last winter. Two streets away a chocolatier is already at work, the smell drifting to the quay where the Nive slides toward the Adour. For five famous days these streets belong to the festayres; the rest of the year, this is the city the party borrowed.

Two rivers, one moved mouth

Bayonne exists because two rivers meet. The Nive comes down from the Basque hills and runs into the Adour here, and the wedge of land between them holds the old city: Grand Bayonne, the cathedral quarter on the left bank of the Nive; Petit Bayonne across the water; and Saint-Esprit across the Adour. The position was built for trade and for war, and it has been both — drawn into the English orbit in 1152 through Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage, and taken by the French crown in 1451.

Trade was the city’s life, and the river nearly ended it: once the English connection was lost, the Adour silted up, ships could no longer reach the quays, and Bayonne spent more than a century as a port in name only. The rescue came in 1578, when dredging directed by the engineer Louis de Foix returned the river to its old mouth near the ocean — and with it the sea trade.

The chocolate came with the refugees

Across the Adour, the quarter of Saint-Esprit grew out of one of the great migrations of the age: Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain at the end of the fifteenth century, who are credited with bringing the craft of chocolate-making north with them. Bayonne built a reputation on it that has never quite faded — this is still a city where chocolate is taken seriously, sold by houses a short walk from the market.

The ham with a literary agent

The swinging leg in the market is the other pillar. Salted, dried ham has been made around the Adour for at least nine centuries — carvings from around 1120 on the portal of Oloron cathedral show pigs slaughtered and cut much as the region still cuts them. Rabelais stocked Grandgousier’s larder with “hams of Mayence and Bayonne” in Gargantua (1534). The recipe is stubborn: pork cured with dry salt from the basin’s salterns, hung for months in air that alternates Atlantic damp with the dry foehn wind, finished in many houses with a rub of piment d’Espelette. Since 7 October 1998 the name has been protected as a European PGI — aged a minimum of seven months, most of them nine or ten, and stamped with the lauburu, the Basque cross.

Gothic bones and a garrison

The cathedral of Sainte-Marie was begun in the thirteenth century and only completed at the start of the seventeenth — the two spires had to wait for the nineteenth. On the pilgrimage route to Compostela, it joined the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998 as part of the Routes of Santiago de Compostela in France, its medieval cloister tucked beside it. At the river’s edge waits the Château-Vieux, a fortress the viscounts of Labourd began at the end of the eleventh century on the walls of the Roman castrum; Vauban made it the north-west anchor of his seventeenth-century defences, and it is still a military post, home today to the 1st Marine Infantry Parachute Regiment. The city even lent its name, or is said to have, to the bayonet: a 1655 writer records a long knife called a bayonette being made in Bayonne — whether the weapon was invented here is contested, and the proudest version of the story traces back to a Voltaire poem.

Five days at the seam of summer

Then the fête. For five days straddling July and August the city hands itself over to the great feria season of the south-west — one chapter of a long maritime book. The municipal archives keep registers of prizes taken by ships armed at Bayonne in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and a nineteenth-century local historian, Édouard Ducéré, needed a whole volume for the corsairs of the old regime. A quieter habit survives: in 1901 the Bayonne-born painter Léon Bonnat gave his collection to his hometown — today’s Bonnat-Helleu museum, with more than 6,500 works and a drawings cabinet ranked among the finest outside the Louvre. Closed for renovation in 2011, it reopened in November 2025.

The scarves stay up because they belong to the buildings now. Under them the market sells the ham, the chocolatiers keep the craft moving, and the two rivers run toward a mouth an engineer reopened in 1578. The fête comes and goes; Bayonne, old before it was festive, stays.