Hotel du Palais

This enormous building started life as a love letter. In eighteen fifty-four, Napoleon the Third built this villa for his wife, Empress Eugenie de Montijo, a Spanish countess he was besotted with. She adored Biarritz. She'd visited as a child and told Napoleon she wanted a summer palace right here, overlooking the ocean. He said yes. Obviously.

The original architect, Hippolyte Durand, got fired mid-construction. His replacement was a twenty-seven-year-old named Louis-Auguste Couvrechef. Imagine being twenty-seven and told to finish building an empress's palace. No pressure.

Now here's the thing about Eugenie. She was a wild ocean swimmer. Every single morning, she'd wade into the Atlantic in a voluminous bathing dress and swim far from shore, preferably when a storm was approaching. This was the eighteen fifties. Women barely showed an ankle in public. She was out there battling waves for fun. She basically invented extreme sea bathing and made it fashionable. European aristocrats followed her here, and suddenly Biarritz was the place to be.

After Napoleon the Third fell from power in eighteen seventy, the villa was sold in eighteen eighty and converted into a hotel casino. Queen Victoria stayed here. So did Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the one everyone calls Sisi. King Edward the Seventh of England was a regular. The guest list reads like a who's who of European royalty.

In nineteen oh three, a devastating fire gutted the interior. They rebuilt it lavishly within the original walls, and what you see today is that reconstruction. The building survived two world wars, bankruptcy, and over a century of Atlantic storms. But it all started because one woman loved swimming in rough seas and an emperor couldn't say no to her.