The Landes de Gascogne (; in Gascon, classic spelling las Lanas de Gasconha, Fébusienne spelling leus Lanes de Gascougne), or Gascony Moors, is a natural region of France of nearly 14000 km². It extends over three departments: Gironde, Landes and Lot-et-Garonne, and includes 386 communes. The region is a flat, sandy plain in the west of the Aquitaine Basin beside the Atlantic Ocean. The interior is cut off from the sea by a barrier of dunes. It is dominated by pine forests that cover 66% of the territory, with islets of agriculture over 18% of the territory.
A periglacial desert during the Last Glacial Period, the Landes de Gascogne was later covered by a mixed forest of deciduous and coniferous trees as the climate warmed in the Holocene. This was largely cleared by humans around 600 AD and replaced by moorland (landes). Both sheep and cattle grazed here, but an epizootic in 1775 destroyed the cows and only sheep remained. The popular image of the Landes was that of a Gascon shepherd standing on stilts to watch over his flock. In the early 19th century the dunes were stabilized, and in the second half of the 19th century an intensive plantation program replaced much of the heathland with stands of maritime pine. Today the economy is dominated by tourism along the coast and forestry for the paper industry in the interior.
Description General The region is a sloping and generally flat sedimentary plateau characterized by poor, sandy soil.
It is this flatness, with the coastal dune barrier preventing the easy flow of fresh water towards the sea, which gave the region its character of wetland, at least before the major drainage works, the fixing of dunes and pine plantation from the end of the 18th century and throughout the 19th century. The landscape of wet moors, surveyed by Landes shepherds on stilts, gave way in the mid-nineteenth century to the first forest in France: the Landes de Gascogne forest which extends over the “triangle of the Landes” (Soulac, Nérac, Hossegor). On the occasion of certain folk festivals, the shepherds once again become the waders of the Landes of yesteryear, who guarded their flocks, dressed in sheepskins, perched high on their stilts.
The region has undergone a profound transformation as a result of these works which in less than a century have completely changed an economy and a culture that was thousands of years old. The agro-pastoral system has given way to industrial sap tapping (previously practiced only in natural coastal forests), and gradually to the timber industry. Industrial and commercial agriculture trials were unsuccessful until the arrival of corn in the 1960s. It is a region that is becoming urbanized and peri-urbanized (+ 2.3% per year in urban sprawl from 2006 to 2009).
The coastline took on more importance with the development of seaside and resort tourism from the mid-nineteenth century (notably with the arrival of the train from 1841 to La Teste-de-Buch, then to Bayonne and Lacanau). Tourism remains an important source of seasonal jobs. The population is rising sharply, with around 839,200 people in 2006 (i.e. + 60% in forty years, + 0.9% / year from 1990 to 1999, + 1.4% per year from 1999 to 2006, 2/3 of the new residents coming from other regions).
International competition and technological developments have hit the forest economy hard, but it remains one of the main sources of wealth in Nouvelle-Aquitaine.
Location
The Landes de Gascogne are bordered to the west by the Atlantic Ocean and to the north-east by the wine-growing fringe of the Médoc, the , the and the . To the south-east they are bordered by the and the , with the course of the Gélise as boundary, Armagnac, Tursan, Chalosse, the and the .
Main towns
Gironde : La Teste-de-Buch, Arcachon. Landes : Dax, Mont-de-Marsan.
Resorts The Landes de Gascogne coastline is part of the Côte d'Argent. Seaside resorts include: Gironde : Soulac, Montalivet, Hourtin, Carcans-Maubuisson, Lacanau, Le Porge, Lège-Cap-Ferret, Arcachon, Pyla-sur-Mer; Landes : Biscarrosse, Mimizan, Contis, Lit-et-Mixe, Saint-Girons, Moliets, Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains, Soustons, Seignosse, Hossegor, Capbreton.
Landes forest
The Landes forest covers . It is a vast triangle stretching from Soulac to Hossegor and as far as Nérac. It covers most of the departments of Gironde and Landes as well as the west of Lot-et-Garonne. About 9% of the forest area is on the coastal dunes and about 91% is inland on the sandy plain of the Landes plateau.
The pine forest covered only before systematic afforestation of the dunes and the Landes plateau modified this landscape. Nowadays maritime pine (Pinus pinaster), the predominant species, represents 80% of the trees that make up the forest. The remaining 20% is made up of oaks, elms, lime trees, chestnut trees, alders, laurels, strawberry trees, plum trees, apple trees, cherry trees, etc. Maritime pines were 85% of trees on over at the start of the 21st century. The composition of the massif is changing, with an increasing proportion of deciduous trees, natural or introduced, which has risen from 8% to 15% in the ten years from 2000 to 2010.
The Landes forest includes diverse landscapes. To the north, the proximity of the Bordeaux vineyards offers landscapes of mixed pine and vines, where and traditional rub shoulders. To the south, the pines gradually give way to the green hills of the Chalosse in the foothills of the Pyrenees. The Côte d'Argent is home to forests with a different undergrowth from that of the interior of the Landes. Strawberry trees (Arbutus unedo), holm oaks (Quercus ilex) and cork oaks (Quercus suber) share the light that is not captured by the pines. At the heart of the forest massif, the presence of a few streams, and in particular the Leyre, is conducive to the development of a forest made up of deciduous trees often hiding the river: the gallery forest.
The wooded area was affected by two major storms, Cyclone Martin (1999) and Cyclone Klaus (2009), during which 26% of the Landes forest by area suffered more than 40% damage to the maritime pines. Especially since the 1976 drought, the massif has also been a regular victim of attacks by pine processionary caterpillars, bark beetles and other pests to which monospecific stands are particularly sensitive, and has been periodically threatened by forest fires.
Etymology
The common word lande (moor) (in Gascon lana / lanne) comes from the Celtic landa alteration of lann enda, that is to say the ends of the land (flat) or the plain, here the great Aquitaine plain. It is a common allusion to maritime borders as well as to their characteristic vegetation, this last vegetal meaning being later and specific to peasant traditions.
The Latin term ager syrticus is another name that recalls that it is about a vast maritime shore, sometimes inundated and marshy, which the ancient cultivators of the Landes sands literally translated as "land worked by the intrusions of the sea or by invasion of waters blocked by dunes and which cannot thus freely access the maritime shores, lands also shaped by the sand-carrying winds, sometimes destroying all life in the wind and which blow in grapeshot, sometimes tens of leagues from the sea, not refraining from bursting into the good countries with a bang". It is this last term ager syrticus passed in medieval Latin which appears on the sketches of the first Carolingian maps, above a white space between Bordeaux and Adour, as in the Universal Geography of Anton Friedrich Büsching in the Age of Enlightenment.
The appellation "Landes de Gascogne" only appears in the 19th century, the region being designated before that by "Landes de Bordeaux", which has a more restrictive meaning today.
Geology
The Cenozoic limestone and molassic substratum of the Aquitaine Basin was affected by tectonic movements which produced an open trench on the Atlantic platform near Biscarrosse. At the end of the Miocene, sediments of oceanic and detrital origin from the Pyrenees accumulated. Subsequently, several processes would result in what is called the "sands of the Landes": At the base, a siliceous clay-sand complex of fluvial and lacustrine origin, thick (kaolinite clays from Luxey-Pissos, Pliocene lignites from Lamothe and Arjuzanx) At the top, fine quartz sands of aeolian origin, a few meters thick; Between the two, siliceous sandstones colored with organic matter and sandstones with ferruginous cement (alios, garluche) in leached podzols.
Geography
The coast is protected by dunes, with unique vegetation, which deprive many small coastal rivers of access to the ocean and lead to the formation of a string of lakes. Arcachon Bay is the only breach in the Landes dune cordon, which is long.
History Before the "Landes desert"
The Landes to Gascogne was a periglacial desert between 21,000 BC and 16,000 BC. Loess, fine sediment produced by glaciation, was blown into the Aquitanian Basin forming a sandy desert. During the Magdalenian period of the Upper Paleolithic, the Landes de Gascogne was uninhabited (but not uncrossable). It formed a "quasi-cultural barrier" between the people living on either side of it.
Concerning the history of the vegetation, based on pollen data, the Landes de Gascogne territory was covered by an important diversified forest (oak, elm, lime, ash, beech, pine, etc.) during the first half of the Holocene (9,700 to 3,900 BC). At the start of the Holocene the forest cover was characterized by a large pine forest, replaced around 6000–5500 BC by an oak grove rich in heliophyte trees and shrubs (birch, hazel, alder, etc.). Although it was subject to regular deforestation from the late Neolithic (around 3500 BC) this forest persisted until the beginning of the Middle Ages (around 600 AD), from which time the intensification of human activities leads in certain sectors to its disappearance and replacement by moorland.
Concerning human occupation, pollen data indicate anthropization dating back to the first half of the Early Neolithic (5,500–6,000 years BC), without archaeological remains to confirm this. The occupation is perennial from the late Neolithic (3500 BC), intensifies during Protohistory (from 3500 BC) and reaches a peak during the Middle Ages. The traditional image of the Grande-Lande is of a marginal or inhospitable space, caricatured under the term "Landes desert". However, this space should be reconsidered as previously densely populated and exploited from the end of the Neolithic period.
Agro-pastoral system
(For more information on the Gironde Landes in the 18th century, see , Variétés Bordeloises, article XXXIX, pages 412–422.)
Until the middle of the 19th century, the inhabitants of the Landes had to contend with the extreme poverty of the soils of their communes. The moor consisted of vast expanses of bare, swampy, flat and unhealthy land. The Landais lived by the agro-pastoral system. Grouped together in "airials" (small isolated hamlets), they cultivated rye and millet, the basis of their meager diet, and raised sheep whose role was to fertilize the land. The image of perched on their stilts comes from this period. This means of locomotion was perfectly adapted to monitor the herds, and to move quickly over long distances.
According to historians cows were numerous before the classic image emerged of the Landes shepherd watching from the top of his stilts as his sheep grazed the short heath. The great epizootic of 1775 destroyed the cows and sheep prevailed. Likewise, it was only after the disappearance of a large part of the forest, decimated in the 17th century by frost, fires and deforestation, that short heath emerged at the end of the 18th century.
On the initiative of the "Captaux de Buch", local lords in the Pays de Buch, undertook to fix the moving sands of the coast which threatened the neighboring dwellings. Later drained the moor by digging ditches, locally called crastes.