July is when the Atlantic can go quiet for a week at a time. The storm track has moved up towards Iceland, what reaches the Bay of Biscay is small and long-travelled, and open sand needs more than that to break properly.
This is where the Basque coast earns its place. The beaches at Biarritz sit on the corner where the coast turns south, they gather what the Landes cannot, and La Côte des Basques works on a swell the open beaches will not register at all. It is a low-tide beach: at high water there is hardly any of it left, so the session is set by the tide table rather than by the alarm clock.
The water reaches 22°C, the warmest anywhere on the French mainland, and around midday the wetsuit becomes a choice.
