The Dune of Pyla is the tallest sand dune in Europe. It is located in La Teste-de-Buch in the Arcachon Bay area, France, 60 km from Bordeaux.The dune is considered a foredune, meaning a dune that runs parallel to a shoreline, behind the high tide line of a beach.
This sand dune is enormous - measuring 500 meter in width, 3 km in length and rising to a height of 107 meter above sea level. Because of the dune’s unexpected location and beauty.The dune is a famous tourist destination with more than one million visitors per year.Interestingly, the dune is relentlessly moving inwards, slowly pushing the forest back to cover houses, roads and even portions of the Atlantic Wall. The rate of movement is discontinuous; sometimes it moves fast (10 meter in a year) and sometimes very slow (less than a meter). During the last 57 years, the dune has moved some 280 meter giving an annual displacement of 4.9 meter per year.
This migration of the Great Dune has covered nearly twenty private properties, and each year the sand of the east slope of the dune covers 8000 square meter of the surrounding pine forest.
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