The French rule of an inn is probably well known to all who will read this. The coffee in the morning, the first meal at or a little before mid-day, the second at six or seven at the latest, and so forth. In Spain they will give you chocolate for your first meal. Your mid-day meal will be at the same hour as the French, but your last meal much later: eight is a usual hour. In France, if you ask for food at an odd time it will be prepared for you; in Spain also but only with incredible delays, and you find universally upon the southern side of the frontier, this difference from the French that the table d’hôte or common meal is prepared only for a fixed number of guests. Newcomers, even if they reach the place two hours before the hour of the supper, have it separately cooked for them, and will suffer a corresponding delay. Here is a national custom which nothing can change, and which is as old as the hills. It was even once universally the habit to have a separate little cooking pot for every guest, and in certain inns that habit is still continued. It is in the last degree inconvenient, and when one has pushed on to the end of some very long day, to shelter and food, it is exasperating. One sees the local people who have done nothing, eat a hearty meal; and one waits an hour or two hours before one is served with a crust. But you can no more change it than you can change any other national habit, and you must be prepared for it on the Spanish side wherever you go. All the details of the cooking are different too; notably these: that for some reason or other, the Spaniard is careless of his oil, or perhaps prefers oil to have a taste of carelessness about it: in places of rancidity. His wine is quite different from the wine of the French. It comes up to him from the hard plains of the Ebro; it has been kept in wine skins and tastes of them. As a rule drink water with, or better still after, Spanish wine. The French wine in these hills (save in the Roussillon) comes from the plains of the Garonne, and has been kept in wood. It has the taste with which we are familiar in this country; the Spanish wine has a roughness, a strength, and a memory of goat’s skin, with which, until he comes to Spain, no northern man can have any acquaintance at all.
It must not be imagined that Spanish accommodation is cheaper than French; comfort for comfort, it is, if anything, a little dearer. But the Pyrenees are cheap everywhere, save in one or two watering-places. Nearly every inn upon either side, however small, can furnish you with a guide, but not every inn with mules, and still less can you depend upon a horse or a carriage, even in places which stand upon the few great highways. If you must hire mules, you will always be able to find one in the village where the inn stands, but, for some reason connected with their local economics, the people of the inn are sometimes actively opposed and often indifferent to your hiring one, and if they tell you that there is no mule to be had (which is their way of opposing you) you must then saunter out and bargain for one with some rival, but remember that you can always get one: all these mountains are covered with herds and droves of mules. Yet mules are expensive, from 1000 to 2000 francs to buy, or even more; from 30 to 50 francs per day to hire, with the man who accompanies you. Remember also, if you have a choice where to hire, that they are better by far upon the Spanish than upon the French side. As for horses and carriages, I will, when I speak of particular inns, mention the few places where I know they can be hired.
A further difference between the French and Spanish side is that, on the whole, an inn upon the Spanish side is less likely to be clean. This does not mean that they are generally uncleanly, very far from it; the houses of the whole of the Basque country on either side are excellently kept, and this is generally true of Catalonia also, but the little hamlets, in the highest valleys which are doubtful upon both sides, are usually worse upon the southern. In every case, of course, you must ask the price of rooms, they expect it, and it is best to ask the price of meals as well. If you do not bargain in this manner, they think of you as of some one who is deliberately throwing money away and they very naturally hasten to pick it up. I remember one meal in the very unsatisfactory town or village of Llavorsi, which was as unsatisfactory as the place itself, and for which a violent Catalonian woman would have charged us the prices of Paris because we did not bargain beforehand, and this, note you, in a place where no one ever comes, which is on the road to nowhere, and which does not see tourists perhaps, or even travellers, once in six months.
In every valley there is some one inn which, if you are wise, you will choose, and which it is worth one’s while modifying one’s plans to visit. I will set down those which I know, beginning as I have done throughout this book, at the western end of the chain, and following it to the east.
In the Baztan, a Basque word for tail, for the valley resembles in shape the tail of a rat, though the other Bastans in the Pyrenees, out of the Basque countries, derive their name from the Arabic word for garden, Elizondo should be your halting-place. Here there are two hotels, one old and one new, the old one in the very middle of the town on the high road, the new one a little to the north, just off the high road. This new hotel is kept by one Jarégui, and in the chief feature of all good hotels (I mean the courtesy and zeal of the management) it is far the best, not only in Elizondo, but in the whole valley. If you should wander on to Pamplona, I can give no advice, but it is a large town where a man may have pretty well what he wants according to the price he pays. My own experience of it is of lodging in small eating-houses, not in a regular hotel, but I understand that the Perla and the Europa are the two best hotels, and of these two, people, as one travels, single out the Europa. On the road from Pamplona to Roncesvalles, there is no good stopping-place. At Erro, as I have said above, there is but one inn and that a very bad one. Burguete is, however, a very pleasant village, and the Hotel des Postes is praised by those who have stopped there. Unless one is caught by night, or in some other way impeded, it is unwise to eat or to sleep at Val Carlos, the contrast between French and Spanish methods is nowhere more violent whether in the matter of cooking, or of delay, or of wine, or of any other thing, than at this corner of the frontier; but it is to be remembered that if you need a horse and carriage you can always have it at Val Carlos for going on into France, and at St. Jean Pied-de-Port you are in the best halting-place for the valley of the Nive and the whole Labourd, just as Elizondo is the best halting-place for the Baztan. St. Jean Pied-de-Port is large enough and frequented enough to have some choice of hotels. You had much better go to the best, which is the Central. The reason it will be worth your while to do this is, that though it is the best hotel in a town to which many rich people come, it is as cheap as it is good. It will always have a carriage for you if you want it, it has a garage, and it is the best centre from which to start upon any of the roads around; and if you should be coming from the north and going south there is a public service from this hotel through the pass as far as Pamplona.
In the next valley, that of the Soule (the river of which is the Saison, and the chief town Mauléon) let Tardets be your head-quarters. It has one of the most delightful inns in all the mountains, remarkable among other things for having various names, like a Greek goddess. Sometimes it is called the “Voyageurs,” sometimes the “Hotel des Pyrenees,” and it is entered under the arcade of the north-west corner of the market square. There you may dine in a sort of glass room or terrace overlooking the river, and every one will treat you well. It is, I say, one of those places that would make one hesitate to go on further into the hills the same day, but if one does, one will find the unique inn at St. Engrace, which I have already mentioned, one of the best that the smaller villages have; it must always be remembered, of course, that these upland hamlets give one nothing but their own fare, and usually a bedroom that is reached through some other, but the beds here are good and the cooking plain. This is the first house in the village on the right as you come in, and as in Elizondo, Jarégui is the name. Remember that they have various sorts of wine, and ask for their best, for even their best costs very little, and their worst is not so good. In the valley between Tardets and St. Engrace, before you leave the main road, you pass by the hotel of Licq, “Hotel des Tourists.” Licq itself you leave to the right beyond the river, but this hotel is built upon the high road. Here is a good place for one meal, though there is no point in sleeping there, yet if one is caught by some accident, one will find it comfortable enough; a little bothersome in pressing one to take guides.
The next valley, the Val d’Aspe, and its prolongation on the Spanish side, the Val d’Aragon, contain many inns, the more important of which should be known before one approaches them.
In Oloron itself, there are two good hotels of which the Voyageurs is perhaps the best, and there is, of course, every opportunity, in such a town, of hiring horses and carriages. There is also, it must be remembered, a public service twice a day up the pass as far as Urdos, not expensive but very slow: no rail yet. It will be possible also at Oloron to hire a pair of horses and a carriage if one wants one for several days to go into Spain and back by way of the Val d’Assau.
There is no occasion to stop, whatever be your mode of travel, between Oloron and Bédous, but should you take up your head-quarters at Bédous (which, it will be remembered, is in the midst of the enclosed plain which characterizes this valley), make the Hotel de la Paix your head-quarters. You will be best treated there, and it is the best centre for information upon the surrounding mountains. Accous is slightly larger than Bédous, but it is off the road and therefore less used to travellers; also it is less comfortable. So if you stop in this plain at all, stop at Bédous.
Your next point will be Urdos, there is nothing of consequence between.