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Bayonne houses

Overview: The capital of Basque country, Bayonne is a beautifully preserved cathedral city, offering narrow streets lined with half-timbered houses, small enough to explore on foot. It is divided by the Nive and Adour rivers and is set between the mountains and the sea a few miles up the coast from Biarritz. It is a busy port and commercial centre sporting an interesting medieval town centre with ramparts and quays and lively markets and festivals. The Bayonne Festival takes place every year for five days from the first Wednesday in August and is an explosion of activity with cow races, bull fights in the Roman arena, candle-lit processions and marching bands. It has two museums: Le Musée Basque, which showcases the traditions, architecture, and decorative arts of the Basque region and Le Musée Bonnat, which displays thousands of drawings and paintings from the 16th to 19th centuries, including works by Rubens, Greco and Ingres.

Activities

Walking in the Pyrénées: The wild mountains of the Pyrénées stretch for 250 miles (402km) from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and have for many centuries formed a natural frontier: physical, climatic and linguistic, between France and Spain. Second only to the Alps among the great mountain ranges of Western Europe, the Pyrénées are much less frequented, and still offer an exciting combination of knife-edged summits, small glaciers, forested valleys, mountain tarns and little-trodden summer passes. Splendid trails lead to the magnificent cirques and lake-spangled basins of France's Pyrénées National Park. Over on the Spanish side paths lead through the spectacular canyons of the Ordesa-Monte Perdido National Park, one of Europe's oldest. In 1997, the United Nations inscribed a portion of the French and Spanish Pyrénées near the French village of Gavarnie and the Spanish village of Torla on its list of World Heritage Sites. Here, nature over the eons has carved three stupendous glacial cirques including the renowned Cirque de Gavarnie and a 3,000ft (914m) deep canyon called Ordesa - Spain's 'Grand Canyon.'