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Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The Basque museum and history of Bayonne has been housed since 1924 in the Dagourette house, a bourgeois residence of the late sixteenth century located quai des Corsaires. This building, classified as a Historical Monument in 1991, had several uses: convent of the visitandines (1640-1643), hospital Saint-Nicolas (1643-1867), and then seat of customs before building the museum. Its architecture combines ancient port elements (wood warehouses on pillars) with a ground window façade, typical of Bayonnaise houses.

The museum offers an ethnographic and historical collection dedicated to the French Basque Country, covering various themes: daily life of shepherds and farmers since protohistory, traditional tools, domestic arts, games, dances and Basque identity throughout the centuries. The permanent exhibition, renovated in 2001, organizes around a central (argialde) light well and presents 3,000 objects divided into 20 thematic rooms, accompanied by trilingual texts (French, Basque, Spanish).

The museum's library, founded in 1924, is the largest in France on the Basque domain, with pastoral manuscripts and Basque books from the 16th and 17th centuries. It complements collections with resources on local history, art and literature. The museum has been run since 2007 by a joint union involving the city of Bayonne, the Côte Basque-Adour agglomeration and the Pyrénées-Atlantiques departmental council.

The Society of Friends of the Basque Museum, founded in 1956, contributes to the enrichment of the collections and publishes since 1924 the Bulletin of the Basque Museum, a scientific journal accessible online. The museum, labeled "Museum of France" in 2003, highlights the material and intangible heritage of the Basque Country, while telling the story of Bayonne, a crossroads of Basque, Gascony and Jewish cultures.

The building consists of two parts: the former port warehouses, witnesses to medieval Bayon urban planning, and the Dagourette house, with its 18th century staircase with wrought iron ramp. The exhibits, collected at the beginning of the twentieth century, illustrate Basque society before modern upheavals, while works of art evoke local cultural identity.

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