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La Baule
La Baule-Escoublac is a seaside resort of Loire-Atlantique, set on the Côte d'Amour between Pornichet and Le Pouliguen. Its beach stretches over more than eight kilometres along the bay of Le Pouliguen, and it is often presented as one of the most beautiful in Europe.
The site was originally occupied by shifting dunes that had buried the old village of Escoublac. From the early nineteenth century, they were fixed by plantations of maritime pines, which today form the Escoublac forest. The Benoît district, to the west, was laid out from 1876, the year the railway arrived, and the link with Paris was completed in 1879. The resort was then covered with villas and grand hotels of varied styles, neo-Gothic, regionalist or more modern. From the 1950s, apartment blocks replaced part of the seafront villas. The commune took its present name of La Baule-Escoublac in 1962.
