OUR RIDES...
Our options allow you to discover a variety of experiences depending on your preferences.
Each item will be quoted according to your needs and preferences on an indicative basis.
€150 per motorcycle for the first hour, €100 for the second hour and €60 per additional hour.
You can also simply let our experts guide you; theywill be able to suggest the most memorable outing depending on the season.
We'll take you there...
From the smugglers'path to the Pepper Road
Full day circuit — Depart Biarritz Approximately 6 hours — €490 per motorcycle
Some days cannot be told. They are lived, and then they stay.
This one begins on the Biarritz seafront, where the Atlantic spreads wide beneath the Basque sky. A place that has seen kings, surfers, poets and smugglers. The Evolution engine starts. So does the day.
Sare — Saran astia
The road leaves the coast and climbs inland. Forty minutes is enough to change era.
The village motto is engraved on the church sundial: Saran astia — in Sare, we have time. The village long lived by what was known here as Gauazko lana — the night work. Smugglers crossed the 36 kilometres of Spanish border in espadrilles, carrying alcohol and tobacco on their backs. Sare still honours that memory each year with a cross-country race in which runners carry an eight-kilo bundle on their shoulders. As for the Rhune — until the 18th century, local people paid a hermit to live at its summit and keep the witches at bay.
Ainhoa — the pilgrim street
A single street, lined with half-timbered houses built for pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela. Founded in the 12th century by a baron of Navarre — partly to keep the English out, and partly to tax the pilgrims passing through. The business of hospitality has a long history.
Look at the lintels. The one at the Maison Gorritia tells, in pink sandstone, the story of a mother who had her house built in 1662 with money sent home by her son from the West Indies. An entire life in a lintel.
Espelette — the red village
In September, the facades disappear beneath garlands of scarlet peppers hung out to dry. Brought by sea in the 17th century in the holds of Basque sailors, the pepper first replaced black pepper — too expensive — before becoming the soul of all local cooking. The only spice in France to hold a Protected Designation of Origin. As long ago as the 17th century, the chocolatiers of Bayonne were already combining it with cacao. A pairing that seems bold until you taste it.
Itxassou and the Pas de Roland
First Itxassou — the village of the black cherry, the one that has filled the Basque cake for generations. Then the Pas de Roland: legend holds that Charlemagne's nephew opened this passage in the rock with a single blow from his horse. Geology has other explanations, but they are less beautiful. You stop. You look. You leave differently.
Bidarray — the bridge of hell
The road folds into hairpin bends above the Nive. Arriving at the village square, with the Iparla ridges as a backdrop, is like stepping into a painting.
The Noblia bridge is said to have been built in a single night by the Laminak, the mischievous spirits of Basque mythology. Close by, the Pont d'Enfer — Hell's Bridge: the devil is said to have thrown himself off it in despair at never having managed to learn Basque. Even the devil has his limits.
Louhossoa — calm between two valleys
A village one passes through too quickly. The farms are low, the oaks ancient, the Nive murmurs below. This is the Basque Country on a weekday.
Larressorre — the village of knowledge
Larressorre looks like nothing much. And yet: for a century and a half, its seminary trained the intellectual elite of the French Basque Country. It is also where the makila is still made — the traditional Basque walking stick, carved from wild medlar wood, engraved by hand, offered as a mark of honour. The finest artisan object this territory has to offer.
Arcangues — hemen bakea
The day ends at Arcangues, and it could not be otherwise.
Founded in 1150, painted in that particular blue adopted by the lords of the place in the Middle Ages and never abandoned since, the village is a belvedere over the Basque Country: the Pyrenees on one side, the Atlantic on the other. Hemen bakea: here, there is peace.
In the churchyard rests Luis Mariano — the great operetta singer of the 1950s, who chose Arcangues to end his days. His grave is in flower in every season. He died on 14 July 1970 — the news cast a shadow over the evening dances across the whole country.
The engine falls silent. So does the day.
What remains are the images, the smells, the voices of people met along the way. That particular feeling of having crossed a territory and understood it a little better than before.
That is a day with Root 64.
The Costal ride
Coastal ride — Depart and return Biarritz Lighthouse
3-hour circuit — from €310 per motorcycle
There are routes that need no history to be great. This one is full of it anyway.
We start at the foot of the Biarritz lighthouse — 73 metres of white granite that has watched over the coast since 1834, and whose 248 steps are, they say, each worth the climb. Below, the Atlantic. Ahead, nothing until Mexico. The Fat Boy or the Softail Heritage takes a breath. So do you. And we head south, along this coast that the Basques simply call the coast — as if no other existed.
Bidart — bideartean zuzena onena
Three kilometres south of Biarritz, Bidart appears on its cliffs like a watercolour placed at the edge of the void. The village owes its name to the crossroads it has always been — bide artean, between roads — and its motto says everything about its character: at the crossroads, the straightest path is the best.
Here, Basque harpooners once watched for whales from the beach at Parlementia. The village coat of arms, created in 1958, still bears the silhouette of a whale and a hunter's vessel — memory of an era when the sea fed people differently. It is the same shore that surfers now cross, on the same waves that the trawlers once navigated.
In May 1660, it was along the old road through Bidart that the royal procession of Louis XIV passed, heading for Saint-Jean-de-Luz to marry the Infanta Maria Theresa of Austria. A marriage of state, a cliff road, and the same ocean as a backdrop.
Guéthary — the smallest port on the coast
Guéthary is a gentle anomaly: the smallest village on the Basque coast, and perhaps the happiest. Fewer than 1,400 souls, a port where the boats are hauled ashore after every outing — there is no room to leave them in the water — and a terrace overlooking one of the most famous waves in Europe.
Parlementia: a right-hander that forms offshore, invisible from the shore until it rises, and that can reach five metres on good winter days. Surfers from around the world make the journey for it. The people of Guéthary, meanwhile, watch it from La Terrasse — capitalised, because that is how it is written here — over a coffee under the tamarisk trees.
The port is a reminder that Guéthary was long a whaling village. The commune's coat of arms still shows a lookout on a promontory and a harpooned whale. Today, twenty colourful boats rest on the pebbles. That is all. That is enough.
Saint-Jean-de-Luz — the city of the royal wedding
A city that had its absolute moment of glory — and needed no other.
On 9 June 1660, Louis XIV married Maria Theresa of Austria, Infanta of Spain, in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste church. A marriage that sealed the Treaty of the Pyrenees and redrew the map of Europe. The king lodged at the Maison Lohobiague, facing the harbour. The queen, across the square, in what is still known as the Maison de l'Infante. After the ceremony, the church door was walled up — so that no other marriage could ever equal it. It still is.
The city keeps that rare balance between the memory of great moments and the everyday life of a fishing port. The tuna boats still leave in autumn for the African coasts. The market smells of salt and pepper. Children play pelota against the fronton on the Place Louis XIV. Saint-Jean-de-Luz does not pretend to be Basque — it is.
Socoa — the end of the world in miniature
At the tip of the Ciboure harbour, Socoa is a headland that juts into the sea as if it means to leave. A 17th-century fort — commissioned by Richelieu, remodelled by Vauban — watches over the entrance to the bay. Breakwaters of cyclopean stone reach out toward the open sea. And at the end, nothing but the ocean.
This is where the French Basque coast takes its leave before plunging toward Spain. Hondarribia is visible on clear days, across the Bidassoa. The border is just a line on a map — the landscape is continuous.
The Corniche road — the great return
We take the corniche north. It is the finest way home there is.
The corniche road follows the cliffs above the sea between Saint-Jean-de-Luz and Biarritz, never quite deciding to leave them. It rises, plunges, follows every headland, reveals every cove. At every bend, the coast shows itself from a new angle — the Basque cliffs, their strata of rock folded by millions of years of tectonics, white surf below. This is not a journey. It is a conclusion.
In a strong westerly, the spray rises to the road. The Evolution engine responds to the hand on the open stretches. The Harley and the corniche have, on that day, exactly the same rhythm.
Biarritz — return to the lighthouse
The lighthouse reappears in the distance, white against the blue. We return along the Côte des Basques — the beach where Peter Viertel placed, in 1956, the first surfboard ever seen in Europe, setting off a revolution without knowing it. A few decades later, Biarritz had become the European capital of surfing. Great stories often begin that way: with an object left on a beach, and someone wondering what to do with it.
The lighthouse has not moved. It watches the sea as it always has. It is a good way to end the day — to come back where you started, and see things differently.
After the beach...
Evening ride — Depart Biarritz Lighthouse, 6:00 pm Two-hour circuit — from €250 per motorcycle
The beach empties. The parasols close. The light begins to change.
This is the moment.
At 6:00 pm at the foot of the lighthouse, the Evolution engine wakes in the early evening. The sea stays in the mirror for a few moments — then the first Labourd hills take over, and the Basque interior begins to tell a different story.
Toward Ahetze — countryside in an instant
Past the last houses of Biarritz, the transformation is immediate. Traffic lights, crowded terraces, hire bicycles — all of it vanishes in a few bends. Ahetze belongs to another world: low farmhouses, meadows still green, oaks forming a vault above the road. The village lives at the pace of its flocks. One does not pass through it, as a rule — one reaches it when one knows it is there.
The small roads — the heart of the country
The roads that link Ahetze to Espelette through the interior appear on no recommended itinerary. No tourist signage, no queue of cars. Just tarmac winding between farms and unnamed hamlets. The late afternoon light gilds the white facades, lengthens the shadows across the meadows, turns every hill into something resembling a painting. There is not much to do but look. That is more than enough.
Espelette — the pause
We arrive from the heights, and the village settles below like a still life in scarlet peppers.
At this hour, the coaches have gone. The streets have returned to their natural rhythm — that of the residents, not the visitors. The Espelette pepper — the only spice in France to hold a Protected Designation of Origin — arrived here in the 17th century in the holds of Basque sailors returning from the Americas. Mild, slightly smoky, almost fruity — nothing like what the word suggests elsewhere.
A shop, a glass of Basque wine, a few minutes on the square. The engine cools. Not for long.
Larressorre — the village of the makila
The road descends toward Larressorre in a series of bends that offer, at every turn, a new version of the same landscape. Its seminary, opened in 1733, trained the intellectual elite of the Basque Country for a hundred and fifty years. And in a workshop that nothing marks from the outside, the house of Ainciart Bergara still makes the makila — the traditional Basque walking stick, carved from medlar wood, engraved by hand, offered as a mark of honour from generation to generation.
Arcangues — hemen bakea
The final stop, and the finest way to close an evening.
The road up is narrow, the bends tight — and then suddenly the village appears, settled on its promontory. Painted blue, that blue of Arcangues adopted in the Middle Ages and never changed since. The fronton square, the old plane trees, the view of the Pyrenees and the Atlantic united in a single glance.
Hemen bakea: here, peace. At this hour, the motto is not a formula — it is a fact.
In the churchyard, the grave of Luis Mariano is still in flower. He died on 14 July 1970, and the evening dances across the whole Basque Country, they say, were quieter for it.
The return — Biarritz, 8:00 pm
The road drops toward the coast. Biarritz comes back to us in fragments: first the light out at sea, then the lighthouse, then the Atlantic filling the whole view.
Two hours or so. Barely sixty kilometres. A different Basque Country from the one of beaches and terraces — quieter, more hidden, perhaps more real.
The lighthouse is where we left it.
The Bespoke Tour...
The ride that does not yet exist
Some people know exactly what they want. A village seen in a photograph, the name of a mountain pass heard in passing, a road that someone described to them one evening and that they have never forgotten. Others simply have a feeling — vague, but precise in its requirements: something unforgettable.
This option exists for both.
Your Basque Country, not ours
Our circuits are proposals, not obligations. The Basque Country is large enough, varied enough, rich enough for each person to find something that no one else has found in quite the same way.
You come back every summer and already know Espelette, Saint-Jean-de-Luz and La Rhune? We will go elsewhere — further into the valleys, higher into the passes, deeper into the interior. Toward Itxassou and its cherry orchards, toward the Iparla ridges above Bidarray, toward Saint-Étienne-de-Baïgorry and its fine red stone houses on the banks of the Nive, toward the villages of Soule that almost no one knows.
You have one day in the region and want to see everything? We will tell you honestly what is truly worth the detour — and at what time you need to be there to see it well.
What you tell us. What we make of it.
One conversation is enough — by phone, by message. You tell us what you are looking for: a slow pace or a packed day, villages or mountain passes, the coast or the interior, a lunch stop at a local producer's or a hidden table that we book for you.
We build the itinerary. We choose the machine according to the route and your preferences. We take care of everything that can be taken care of — so that on the day itself, all you have to do is get on.
A few ideas, if you need a starting point
The mountain pass route — Aldudes, Roncesvalles, the summits of Lower Navarre along roads that have no name on any map but that shepherds have known for centuries.
A day in the Spanish Basque Country — cross the border, follow the coast from Hondarribia to San Sebastián, lunch beside the Concha bay and return via the heights.
Dawn on the coast — depart at sunrise from the Biarritz lighthouse, when the light does what it only does for one hour a day and the roads are still empty.
The gourmet ride — a day built around the producers, cellars, cheese-makers and chocolatiers we have known for years, who open their doors to us differently than to an ordinary visitor.
What we will not do: a generic circuit renamed as bespoke. If your request resembles one of our existing itineraries, we will say so — and offer it to you. If it differs, we build something that has never existed before.
It takes longer to prepare. It is better.
Price on request according to duration and itinerary. Contact Philippe or Olivier to discuss.
The Gift Card?
Giving the unforgettable
There are gifts that are forgotten, and gifts that stay.
The ones that stay are rarely the most expensive. They are the most fitting — those that tell someone you truly know them, that you thought about what would do them good rather than what is easy to find.
A Root 64 ride is two hours or a full day that someone will live intensely, talk about for a long time, and not forget. Not one more object in a drawer. An experience — and experiences do not gather dust.
For whom?
For the one who has always had a quiet curiosity about beautiful machines but never quite dared.
For the one who has known the Basque Country for twenty years and thinks they have seen it. They have not seen it like this.
For both of them, together — because some things are better shared, and riding on a 1992 Harley Davidson is one of them.
For a birthday, a celebration, a departure, a homecoming. Or for no particular reason — those are often the best pretexts.
How it works
You choose one of our rides — the coastal promenade, the route of the illustres, the evening escapade, or a bespoke experience — or you leave the choice to us, and we advise the recipient when they get in touch.
We hand you the gift card in an envelope, ready to give. It is valid for one year, to be used on whichever date suits the recipient, on simple reservation.
The rest — the road, the stories, the machines, the evening light on the Labourd hills — we take care of.
Gift cards available for all our rides. Valid for one year from the date of issue.
Enquiries and orders through Philippe or Olivier.