Pau

From its medieval charm to the splendour of the Renaissance, from the imprint of the romantics to the first tourists who turned the city into an "English town", Pau shimmers with all the facets of a grandiose history. Proud of its past, but well within its time, it has, for example, turned a 1900 palace into a well-equipped congress centre and a neo-gothic convent into a national school of music and dance of the most modern kind...

Pau "City of Art and History"

Here, a pebble and brick facade recalls the craftsmen who used to extract the materials for the noble palace residences. There, in front of the Fine Arts Museum or Place Clémenceau, Art Deco takes us back to the 1930s.

Here, the gardens are kings, the national gardens of the Castle, emblematic palm trees against a backdrop of the Pyrenees, oaks, Lebanese cedars, imposing sequoias, there, ginkgo bilobas, and Siberian elms adorn the city under the effect of a beneficial climate...

Here the Boulevard des Pyrénées, the "sublime terrace" for Maurice Barrès, "the most beautiful view of the land" for Lamartine remains without a doubt, the favourite promenade of all the Palois.

Here, at every corner of the old streets, History is alive : Bernadotte, founder of the reigning dynasty of Sweden, and Henry IV of France and Navarre, - in Béarn we say Nouste Henric -, are reborn from a detail or an anecdote.

→ The town of Pau is 20 km from the Pays de Nay (25 min).