Côte d'Argent

The Côte d'Argent ("Silver Coast") extends from the Gironde estuary in the north to beyond Bayonne on the Spanish frontier in the south before joining the Côte des Basques to the southwest.

The charm of this stretch of coast lies in its beautiful beaches of silvery sand, fringed by areas of woodland, a number of attractive lakes and dunes which reach a height of more than 100 m/330ft at Pyla. Along the coasts are numbers of seaside resorts like Soulac-sur-Mer, Arcachon and Mimizan.

For many centuries the masses of sand deposited on the coast at an annual rate of around 15 cu. m per meter of coast (18 cu. yd per yard) were blown eastwards by the wind and formed traveling dunes which reached far inland, advancing at the rate of up to 25 m/80ft a year. The land farther in from the coast became a mixture of sandy steppe and heathland, clogging up the rivers and forming expanses of infertile and unhealthy bog and marshland. Towards the end of the 18th C. efforts were made to consolidate the dunes by planting coniferous trees, and by 1867 3,000 hectares/7,500 acres of coastal dunes and 80,000 hectares/200,000 acres of inland dunes had been consolidated in this way, transforming the former barren landscape into a green belt of pines and oaks. Between 1943 and 1950, however, a third of the 900,000 hectares/2,250,000 acres in existence in 1939 was destroyed by devastating forest fires - a loss which has since been made good by reafforestation. The area is now increasingly being developed for agricultural use (maize).