Travel: Dune du Pilat, Bordeaux

Following on from my post last week of our trip to Toulouse, which featured lots of photos of peeling painted doors and French shuttered windows (see it here) here’s the second half of our Easter weekend, spent in Bordeaux. Not many people know, but about an hour away from Bordeaux there is a gigantic dune called the Dune of Pilat (or Dune du Pilat – Pilat originates from the Gascon word Pilhar, which refers to a heap or mound).

It’s the tallest sand dune in Europe, stretching 2.7km along the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean (and here’s a wikipedia fact for you – it has about 60,000,000 m³ of sand!). We went one sunny afternoon, expecting the little mound-like dunes we get on the British coast, but no this was huge. It really was like scaling a mountain and being met with a desert – once we had got to the top and got our breath back, it really was a ‘wow’ moment. On one side you have the forest and on the other the sea, quite bizarre but incredibly beautiful. It rises as a steep slope on one side and gently cascades down to the sea on the other. The blue sky against the white sand was as blue as blue can be, while up and down the soft undulations you could find a spot to rest from the unrelenting wind. The fun part was sliding back down the sand at the end – for a moment we were kids again.

  
All images my own