Apart from nice connoisseurs of the History of the Landes and inhabitants of the South-West, within the collective creativeness, the Landes forest has at all times been a forest. Besides that is not the case. Which is taken into account as we speak as one of the vital vast expanses of woodland of Europe was, solely yesterday on the dimensions of Historical past, a desert populated by shepherds and sheep.
If we return in time to the Center Ages, the forests of Landes and Médoc that we all know as we speak had been principally nothing apart from an unlimited plateau of sand. “A false, trompe-l’oeil desert which has earned the Landes, for a very long time, the nickname of the Sahara of France,” explains Jacques Sargos, a Bordeaux historian specializing within the Landes forest.
Pine planting started within the fifteenth century
On the time, sheep and farmers constituted the one inhabitants of this a part of the territory, humid in winter and arid in summer time. “There have been already pines, however focused on the banks of the watercourses,” continues the historian. And in response to him, the exploitation of this useful resource dates again to Antiquity, “as a result of resinous merchandise had been very helpful within the navy”. As demand on this space grew, pine manufacturing was rapidly exceeded. “From the top of the fifteenth century and the start of the sixteenth century, the planting of pine timber was favored, notably in Marensin, which noticed the event of an actual synthetic pine forest,” says Jacques Sargos. “Lengthy earlier than Napoleon III,” he insists.
Since then, the Landes forest has continued to develop. On the Bordeaux facet too. Not just for resin but in addition for wooden, demand for which has exploded with the event of wine-growing exercise within the sector. “In Bordeaux, we might see the looks of forestry from the 18th century, with the rationalization of row-sown pine plantations,” says the historian.
Fires are a part of the historical past of this forest
It was throughout this century that pine took priority over sheep, largely favored by the lords for the straightforward and plentiful supply of earnings that it supplied them. Definitely, the sheep breeders, who had utilization rights on the land, noticed pink when the lords kicked them out to plant pine timber. In response to the specialist, “there have been main trials which typically lasted a really very long time”. At the least “till Napoleon III handed legal guidelines within the nineteenth century favoring the afforestation of the moors”.
On the finish of the nineteenth century, “the forest is steady between Lot-et-Garonne, Médoc and Landes”, in response to the historian. The coated floor then extends over roughly a million hectares. “There have been many makes an attempt over the centuries to plant one thing else however it by no means labored, the pine has cannibalized all the things,” says the writer of the e book Historical past of the Landes forest, from the desert to the golden age (The Chimerical Horizon, 2004). And even as we speak, except for the extremely urbanized shoreline, it’s nonetheless pine that dominates.
Fires are an integral a part of the historical past of this forest. “As quickly because the pine plantation started to develop, there have been fires,” laments Jacques Sargos. He cites, amongst others, a hearth which ravaged 50,000 hectares in Marensin within the 18th century, and the author François Mauriac who, at first of the twentieth century, described day by day fires within the Landes. “For lack of fields, of moor, there was and nonetheless is now not any firebreak as we speak. It’s the continuity of the massif, the key downside.”