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Five minutes from Ascain, on the last stretch of French coast before Spain, is the town where you'll be staying — and where the shuttle will collect you on the wedding day. It has been a whaling port, a corsairs' harbour, and, for one morning in June 1660, the centre of Europe.

The royal wedding

On the 9th of June 1660, Louis XIV married Maria Theresa of Spain in the church of Saint-Jean-Baptiste, a few steps off the main square. The marriage sealed the Treaty of the Pyrenees and ended a generation of war between the two kingdoms. The ceremony ran three hours.

The door the couple walked out of was bricked up afterwards. The romantic version says no one was ever allowed to use it again; the honest version is that it vanished when the church was later enlarged. Both are told here, and you can still see where it was.

Inside, the church looks like nowhere else — tiers of carved oak galleries running around a dark nave, and a golden altarpiece climbing the far wall.

A nest of corsairs

People have fished from here since the 9th century: whales first, then cod off Newfoundland, and today the tuna and anchovy that still come into the harbour you can walk around.

In wartime the whalers turned privateer. Saint-Jean-de-Luz sent out corsairs under licence from the king to raid enemy shipping, and did it so well that the English called the place a nest of vipers. One captain, Coursic, was reported to Louis XIV as having brought home more than a hundred captured ships.

The bay

The bay looks placid now. It was not always. A storm in 1782 carried off forty houses and the Ursuline convent, and within twenty-five years the town had lost two thirds of its people. In 1822 an entire quarter went the same way.

Napoleon III finally ordered the sea kept out. The three long breakwaters across the mouth of the bay — Socoa, Artha and Sainte-Barbe — are the reason the Grande Plage is now one of the calmest swimming beaches on this coast.

Across the water

Ciboure is the other half of the harbour, two minutes over the bridge. Maurice Ravel was born there in 1875, in the tall Dutch-gabled house on the quay.

One thing to eat

Maison Adam has been making macarons to the same recipe since before the royal wedding — a pyramid of them was presented to Louis XIV and his bride in 1660. Soft, deeply almond, nothing like the Parisian sort.

After that: gâteau basque, black cherry jam from Itxassou, and whatever came off the boats that morning.