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Bastide (planned town)Pyrénées-Atlantiques

La Bastide-Clairence

La Bastide-Clairence

Dimensions
The place des Arceaux, 30 metres by 70, surrounded by arcades and by timber-framed houses in the Labourd style, with gable walls and corbelling, standing alongside Navarrese houses with arched doorways; the 14th-century church of Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption, with a Romanesque porch and a cemetery courtyard paved with funerary slabs; the trinquet Gartxot of 1512 with its central net and galleries; the old Jewish cemetery; the chapel of Notre-Dame de Clairence of 1886 over a 13th-century spring.
Period
Navarrese bastide of 1312; 14th-century church; houses rebuilt mostly in the 16th century; trinquet of 1512; Jewish community from the 17th to the 18th century.
What stands there
Jewish cemetery and trinquet Gartxot (2011) inscribed as monuments historiques; church classified according to the Fédération des Bastides. Les Plus Beaux Villages de France label; Sites et Cités remarquables. The Portuguese Jewish community numbered 70 to 80 families in the 17th century; the oldest grave dates from 1620.

Twenty kilometres south-east of Bayonne, on a hillside above the river Aran, La Bastide-Clairence is the bastide of the kingdom of Navarre: "la Bastida nueva de Clarenza" appears in 1312, when Louis I of Navarre, the future Louis X the Quarreller, granted a charter modelled on that of Marciac to settlers come mostly from the Bigorre and from Gascony. The aim was to hold this wooded frontier zone and to open an access to the sea by the river. A street village of perfect regularity, the bastide runs down towards its former river port; its arcaded square, lined with timber-framed houses in red or green, today houses craft workshops. The 14th-century church and its flagged cemetery courtyard, the trinquet Gartxot of 1512, the oldest surviving jeu de paume, and the Jewish cemetery of the 17th-18th centuries make of this Plus Beau Village de France a place of rare density of history.

Further reading

Getting there : Freely accessible market town. Market on Tuesday; evening farmers' market on Friday evening, Basque Country potters' market in September. Tourist office at La Bastide-Clairence.

Opening times and access details are given as a guide only: check before you set out.

See it on the map OpenStreetMap Directions

Ambient sound

La Bastide-Clairence
JLVwiki · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

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In the same department

All places — Pyrénées-Atlantiques (24).