surf-south-of-france

Its only 8 weeks to go till our next surf holiday!

We will be driving the minibus down from Newquay to Portsmouth on the 7th September.  We cross the English Channel to Le Havre by ferry. We then drive down to Seignosse near Hossegor in South West France The journey is about 700 miles!

It’s very picturesque, passing through some amazing French regions, past the towns of Nantes, Niort, Bordeaux, and down to Seignosse.

This topFrench location is in the region of Landes. The area has an interesting history, and was not always so welcoming! The Landes region is flat and the soil is uniformly sandy. One hundred years ago, the land was a boggy swamp filled with disease and the coastline was unstable.

The law imposed by Emperor Napoleon III in 1857, ordered all the communes of Gascogne Landes, not just the coastline, be drained and then planted with maritime pines, making the land useable and rich. Bit by bit, pines covered Les Landes, changing the landscape and reducing the expanse of more than 100,000 hectares of moors. This made room for the young forest that would become one of the largest industrial forests in Europe. The dunes were also created to protect the newly recovered land from the sea.

Today the region is really beautiful; made up of large plantations and a coastline of flat sandy beaches, backed by large shifting sand dunes which are nature conservation areas.

All this work means that we can reach all those surf breaks along the coast, and we can enjoy the land of Landes too!

If you’d like to join us click on the link to the right ‘Book a surf trip to France’ to see full holiday details.