Villa Belza

The name means black in Basque. Belza. And this place has earned it. That neo-medieval silhouette perched on the cliff with turrets jutting out over the Atlantic was built between eighteen eighty-two and eighteen eighty-nine by architect Alphonse Bertrand. It looks like it belongs in a gothic novel, and honestly, its history reads like one.

In the nineteen twenties, a man named Gregoire Beliankine took it over and turned it into a Russian restaurant. Beliankine was the brother-in-law of Igor Stravinsky. Yes, that Stravinsky. The composer of The Rite of Spring. Beliankine threw legendary themed parties here. He hosted so-called African Nights with live gorillas and boa constrictors roaming the garden while guests dined. Just picture that. A cliff-edge villa in the Basque Country, a Russian throwing parties with actual gorillas, and the brother-in-law of one of the greatest composers in history probably lingering somewhere in the background.

Then the Nazis arrived. In nineteen forty, the German army requisitioned Villa Belza and built a concrete blockhouse right here to protect the port they'd occupied. The same rooms where Stravinsky's in-laws threw gorilla parties became a military installation.

After the war, locals started telling ghost stories. The cave directly beneath the villa is known as the Devil's Hole. The combination of that name, the medieval silhouette, the cliff-edge location, and the genuinely dark history has made Villa Belza the most haunted-feeling building in Biarritz. People claim to hear things. The wind does strange things on this cliff, funnelling through gaps and howling at unexpected moments.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, standing here looking at a building named Black that housed gorilla parties and then a Nazi bunker, sitting above something called the Devil's Hole, you have to admit the atmosphere is doing a lot of heavy lifting.