5 Best Sights in Biarritz, The Basque Country, Gascony, and Hautes-Pyrenees

At the glitzy Casino de Biarritz you can play the slots and blackjack or just chill while channeling your inner James Bond. It's open daily from 9 am until 4 am.

Eugénie and her Carlist compatriots weren’t the only exiled royals to arrive in Biarritz. White Russians found refuge, too, turning the city into their Yalta-by-the-Atlantic. Witness the Église Orthodoxe Russe, a Byzantine-style church they built adjacent to the Grand Plage in the early 1890s. Note that opening hours can be irregular.

If you wish to pay your respects to the Empress Eugénie, visit La Chapelle Impériale, which she had built in 1864 to venerate a figure of a Mexican Black Virgin from Guadalupe (and perhaps to expiate her sins for furthering her husband's tragic folly of putting Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlotta on the "throne" of Mexico). The style is a charming hybrid of Roman-Byzantine and Hispano-Mauresque. Entry is by guided tour only, and open days and hours are changeable, so call ahead.

Biarritz's urban beaches are understandably popular—particularly the fine, sandy strands of La Grande Plage and the neighboring Plage Miramar, both set amid craggy natural beauty. A walk along the seaside promenade gives a view of the foaming breakers that beat constantly upon the sands, giving the name Côte d'Argent (Silver Coast) to this part of France’s Basque Coast. As you drink in that view, try to imagine the gilded days when the fashionable set used to stroll here in Worth gowns and picture hats.

During Biarritz’s original heyday, the elite often retired to the terraced restaurants of festive Place Ste-Eugénie, still considered the social center of town.