CREST of the WAVE

On France's rugged Basque Coast, old-school glamour meets shaggy surf culture-and creates an irresistible mix.

- David Amsden

WHEN I ARRIVED in Biarritz on a sun-dappled morning in late September, it had been nearly 170 years since Napoleon III chose this stretch of seaside in southwestern France as the site of his summer residence. Yet it took little effort to imagine the place as the emperor knew it. Villa Eugénie, the lavish estate named after his wife, still rises conspicuously from a bluff overlooking the main beach: a testament to how imperial extravagance turned what was once a remote Basque whaling village into a haven for European high society. It is now the unapologetically baroque Hôtel du Palais Biarritz, where I would be staying. So for all I knew, my first moments in town — standing on the balcony of my chandeliered guest room, feeling as if I’d sneaked into a royal retreat — unfolded in what was once the bedroom of the last monarch of France. 

This little spell did not last long. Or, I should say, it was quickly replaced by another. Staring down at the Grande Plage, as the beach below the hotel is known, I spotted two lanky young men. Clad in wet suits, surfboards tucked under their arms, they stood surveying the waves breaking off a rock jutting out of the sea. Suddenly, it could have been 1956, the year an American screenwriter named Peter Viertel came to Biarritz and altered it as dramatically — if a little more accidentally — as Napoleon III had done a century before.