Chapelle de Notre Dame de l'Aubépine

On the heights of the village, at an altitude of 389 metres, Mount Atsulai is home to a small sanctuary dedicated to Our Lady of the Hawthorn, which can be reached after a 45-minute walk. The chapel and its 26 discoidal and tabular steles, symbols of Basque funerary art, offers a magnificent panorama of the Xareta valley, the Rhune and the ocean.
In the 19th century, Canon César Duvoisin and Abbot Etchegoyen wrote beautiful pages about the chapel, its history and its practices, but it is to Abbot Olhagaray, the parish priest of Ainhoa from 1930 to 1938, that we owe the only study devoted to it in the Basque language. Legends and mythical characters give this place a set of beliefs that oscillate between magic, religion and history.