Le Touquet-Paris-Plage

Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, a chic resort's great beach and a historic board-sport ground (land yachting has raced here since 1910): a giant low-tide foreshore strewn with flat pools, and, as a bonus for the self-reliant, the flat basin of the Canche estuary when the wind turns offshore on the beach.

Le Touquet is the great beach of a chic resort — Paris-Plage — and a historic board-sport ground: land yachting has raced here since 1910, and the kite school sits at the same south base as the yachts. The spot has two waters. The seafront first: open sea, flat and chop with small waves that build markedly in wind around 15 knots, and above all the famous 'bâches' — the northern equivalent of the Atlantic baïnes. These holes, which form, move and reshape with the tides, offer flat water to kiters, but they can reach two metres deep and, on a falling tide, a very strong current sweeps out to sea: if caught on foot, swim parallel to the beach. Three drownings on the Côte d'Opale drove the danger home. The foreshore is huge and its bottom can't be memorised. To the south, opposite the thalassotherapy centre, the wreck of the Socotra, grounded in 1915, surfaces on big tides — exactly where you rig for space on a strong tide. The second water is the Canche bay basin, to the north: flat, ideal for self-reliant freestyle, but rideable only on a rising tide — and beware, the safe sector there is reversed compared with the beach (you ride north-west; the south-west, safe on the seafront, turns offshore there). In summer, kiting is squeezed south of the sailing base, the rest being bathing zone. And the tide commands everything: on a big tide at high water, there's almost no beach left. A great all-round spot, as long as you never mix up the rules of its two faces.