When you leave the main roads, it is first of all a smell that calls out, that of the pines. At the sight of the first conifers, you lower the window, close your eyes and take a deep breath of these very special fragrances, a heady mixture of turpentine and bark. Any lover of the Landes will tell you about this so familiar experience before evoking the light, which gently crosses the alignments of pines. “In winter, it is even more beautiful, it is low-angled and oscillates between orange and pink”says the one who runs the Contis bookshop and whose name is very Landes, Virginie Lapeyre.
A light and a smell that accompany you on the small departmental roads to the ocean. Final destination. In winter, there is nothing or rather the essentials. Saint-Girons Plage is deserted. Both campsites are closed. The storefronts and restaurants on the only street are nailed with wooden planks. The bitumen and the terraces are covered with sand. It feels like a village in the Far West. The contrast is all the more striking when you know this crowded place in summer.
On the dune, the same impression of uninhabited, bare, the houses are closed and the sand nibbles away from the ground. A void that accentuates the dimension of the landscape: the ocean seems to rumble louder, the dunes to be even wilder and the forest a little more secret. The first to settle here certainly felt this isolation. In 1865, the State allocated concessions on the sand and the first wooden houses were built on the dune. Thus was born the seaside resort of Saint-Girons. One of the first houses was called Los Perduts. The lost, in Gascon.
Today the most coveted housing estate on the coast has about sixty dwellings, the oldest on the seafront – here we are talking about first line. Most of them still belong to old Landes families. Two worlds, with that of the tourists installed in the campsites, which do not really mix in summer.
Sesame to the wild beach
In Saint-Girons, Virginie Lapeyre remembers Mimi Lensalade as a child. This local figure ran the family hotel, Au Rescapé. It’s a bit like her Proust madeleine, like the Cap de l’Homy, the beach where she came with her parents after leaving Paris to join the Landes, or even the pieces of terracotta resin pots in the sand, traces of the bygone era of tapping, the operation which consists in wounding the pine to collect the gem, the resin.
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