A manufactured landscape
Before the mid-19th century, the landscape of Landes de Gascogne was a vast, waterlogged plain of moors and marshes. This terrain, covering nearly 14,000 square kilometers, had poor drainage due to its flatness and a coastal dune barrier that blocked freshwater from reaching the sea. The stagnant water created ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes, making endemic malaria a problem that afflicted the local population. The region was sparsely inhabited and considered inhospitable, sometimes called the "French Sahara" due to the difficulty of traversing it.
The dominant economy was a pastoral system based on sheep herding. To navigate the boggy ground and keep watch over their flocks, shepherds developed a unique adaptation: they walked on 5-foot-tall wooden stilts called tchanques ("big legs"). This practice, recorded since the 1700s, allowed them to cover long distances and keep their feet dry. The soil here is largely sandy, sitting atop a layer of ironstone hardpan known as garluche, which was once mined locally as a building material and low-grade iron ore. To the west, the Atlantic coast was lined with shifting dunes that could advance up to 40 meters per year, threatening to bury villages.
The 1857 law of sanitation
The transformation of the Landes began with Emperor Napoleon III and the Law of June 19, 1857. This law mandated the drainage and afforestation of the communal lands to sanitize the region and promote economic development. The instrument for this massive geo-engineering project was the maritime pine, Pinus pinaster. Early experiments, some dating to the 1780s, had already shown this species was effective at stabilizing coastal dunes. The pine was well-suited to the acidic, sandy soil and, critically, its extensive root system absorbs large quantities of water, which would drain the malarial swamps.
Over the following decades, a million hectares—an area roughly 10,000 square kilometers—were planted almost exclusively with maritime pine. This created the largest artificial forest in Western Europe. A vast network of canals and ditches was dug to manage water flow. The project altered the ecology and economy of the region. The traditional pastoral society of stilt-walking shepherds disappeared as the moors were replaced by pine plantations. A new economy emerged, based first on tapping the trees for their resin (a practice called gemmage) to produce turpentine, and later on timber. Today, the forest produces around 10 million cubic meters of timber annually, accounting for over 25% of France's total wood production.