La Grande Motte is a seaside town built in the 1960s and 1970s. It was originally built to accommodate the European and French tourists who used to spend their summer vacation in Spain, better equipped for mass tourism. The French government thus launched a series of big construction projects along the coast, which basically consisted in marshes infected by mosquitos, where only a handful of fishermen used to live.
For this project the Architect, Jean Balladur, drew his inspiration from pre-columbian pyramids as found in Mexico, and Modernism a la Oscar Niemeyer.
Although the city is now a popular holiday spot in the summer, with more than 2 million visitors a year, only 8,000 live there permanently.
Here's a few pictures I took during my trip through southern Europe last December, as well as few I took three or four years ago.
Although bit was built at a time where urbanism revolved around cars, Balladur did a good job at building a very walkable and dense city thanks to the necessity to preserve wildlife along the coast.
Yes, there is a lot of parking - since hundreds of thousands of tourists are flocking there in the summer -, but streets are usually boarded with retail - although a lot of it is closed for the winter.
