Hôtel du Palais

Every great beach has one: the old lady in pearls who still comes down to the water as if nothing has changed. In Biarritz she has sat above the Grande Plage since the days of crinolines, in red brick and pale stone, while the town below traded them for neoprene. She was born a summer house, built by Napoleon III for his empress, and she has never quite got over it.

Eugénie set the tone. She did not simply walk into the Atlantic. A wooden cabin was carried down to the sand for her and taken away again when she was done, because the ocean, in those days, was to be met discreetly and with help. The beach had seen stranger things. It was once the Plage des Fous, where the mentally ill were dunked as a cure. And in 1956 a Hollywood film crew left behind a broken surfboard, which local boys patched up, waxed with paraffin meant for jam jars and carried into the waves. Europe has been surfing ever since.

Today the town is one long beach party of flip-flops, surf shops and pintxo bars, and the Palais presides over it in full evening dress. She looks like a guest who arrived at the wrong event and simply stayed. Strictly speaking, the party came to her. Biarritz adores her for it. The town owns most of the house itself, through a company it controls.

Her wardrobe is impeccable. She keeps her own seamstresses, an upholsterer and a cabinetmaker on the staff, and the imperial bee is woven into her carpets. In La Rotonde, a round dining room whose windows hold nothing but ocean, dinner is a polished return to the classics: egg mayonnaise with caviar, then a baked Alaska, as if the last fifty years of food fashion were a passing phase.

Her one concession to the beach is the pool. It is filled with seawater and heated far beyond anything the Atlantic would consider, and at the end of the terrace a little gate opens straight onto the sand. Below, the lifeguards split the beach between swimmers and surfers, so white robes and black wetsuits can share it without having to make conversation.

Up close, she shows her age. Her last great facelift stopped short of the north wing, the breakfast room and the spa, and there the glamour wears thin. Some rooms look at the town instead of the sea, the beach heaves in August, and when the red flag goes up, it goes up for everyone. She suits travellers who like their seaside with a chandelier and do not mind a little powder over the cracks.

She has outlived an empire, a fire and every fashion on the sand below. Her oldest admirer still calls. A few times a year, when the equinox storms roll in, the Atlantic climbs onto her pool terrace, soaking wet and hopelessly underdressed, and she lets it in every time.