La Grande Plage is the town beach, a sand-bottomed break going left and right on a westerly swell with an easterly offshore, and it shares October's figures with the Côte des Basques: thirteen clean days out of thirty, fourteen blown out, three too small.
Its advantage over its neighbour is that it does not depend on the tide in the same way. Its disadvantage is everything else about being the beach in the middle of a resort town: it is crowded whenever it works, and what you watch for is the crowd and the water quality rather than anything on the seabed.
For a first session it is the fallback when the Côte des Basques is on the wrong tide. And it is the beach you walk out of two minutes from a café.
Spot sheet
- Level
- Beginner, Intermediate
- Wave
- Left and right
- Bottom
- Sand
- Swell window
- WSW – WNW
- Ideal wind
- E
- How often it works
- Consistent
- Crowd
- ●●●●○
- Danger
- ●●○○○
A month in figures
In October, the month the forecast guides single out for this coast:
Shares of the month, from the published forecast statistics. The model reads a grid, so neighbouring breaks share a figure: this describes a stretch of coast, not this wave on its own. The other eleven months are not published.
What to watch for
- Water quality
Technical figures read off published surf guides. Where two disagree, the sheet says so.