Europe's tallest sand dune and the finest oysters in France — Atlantic Bordeaux coast
Arcachon is a Belle Époque resort town on France's Atlantic coast, famous for two things above all: the Dune du Pilat — at 106 metres the tallest sand dune in Europe, a shifting mountain of sand above pine forest — and the oysters of the Arcachon Basin, where 10,000 tonnes of flat European oysters are farmed each year. The town itself has four 'seasons' (quarters) built in the 1860s for different times of year, with extraordinary gingerbread villa architecture.
Arcachon was created almost from scratch in the 1850s when the Bordeaux–La Teste railway arrived and the Pereire brothers began developing it as a resort. The four-seasons urban plan — Ville d'Hiver (winter, villas for tuberculosis patients in sheltered pine forest), Printemps, Été (summer, casino and grand hotels), and Automne — was unique in French urban planning. The Dune du Pilat has been moving inland at roughly 1–4 metres per year for centuries, burying a pine forest on its eastern edge.