A summer destination par excellence, the Bay of Arcachon has many assets and attractions that go far beyond its climate, its beaches and its oyster-farming harbours.
Arcachon – the Ville d'Hiver (Winter Town)
Arcachon's historic district, the Ville d'Hiver is a mosaic of villas dating from the Second Empire.
At first a fishing village, then a resort that embraced the fashion for sea bathing around the 1820s, Arcachon was born as a town in 1857, when it was definitively established as a commune by imperial decree.
And it was on forested land at the top of a dune, on the initiative of the brothers Émile and Isaac Pereire – bankers and shareholders of the Compagnie des Chemins de Fer du Midi railway company – that the French and European aristocracy and upper middle class built chalets and then villas, in a maze of winding lanes, around a park known as the “Parc Mauresque”, at the centre of which stood a casino that has since disappeared.
A listed site, the Dune du Pilat – whose sand, among the finest on the planet, is trodden every year by countless visitors – is a genuine natural monument in motion.
The highest dune in Europe, nicknamed by some “the Great White Lady”, is an open-air book.
Between pine forest and Atlantic Ocean, 40 centuries of history beneath your feet and remains dating from the early Iron Age!
