Côte d'Argent

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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).