La Graviere breaks over a sandbar directly in line with the Capbreton canyon, which is why a beach break here behaves like a reef: the swell arrives with its energy intact and stands up all at once.
It takes a westerly swell with an easterly offshore. October is its best month: fourteen clean days out of thirty, fourteen blown out, two too small. Almost half of the good days are lost to wind, and almost none to a lack of swell.
The bottom is sand, so the danger comes from people. On a wave that pitches this hard in shallow water, a busy line-up is the real risk, and it is busy on any autumn day when the whole coast has turned up. The Landes are not a place to learn, and this is the break that means: for a first week, Biarritz is forty minutes south.
Spot sheet
- Level
- Advanced, Expert
- 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
No guide names a hazard here. That is not the same as safe.
Technical figures read off published surf guides. Where two disagree, the sheet says so.