The Pesquiers salt pans and the flamingos

Between Hyères and the Giens peninsula the coast splits into two thin sand bars with a lagoon trapped between them, and that lagoon is the Salin des Pesquiers — a salt works from the middle of the nineteenth century until 1995, five hundred hectares of shallow basins now owned by the coastal conservancy and run as a protected wetland.

It is the strangest landscape near the Riviera: flat water to the horizon, low dykes, the rusting frames of the old saltworks, and pink flamingos standing in it in numbers that go from dozens to well over a thousand depending on the season. Behind them, on a clear day, the hills of the Maures. Nothing about it looks like the coast twenty minutes away.

Sunrise and the last hour before sunset are what you come for. The water is a mirror when there is no wind, the flamingos catch the low sun, and the sky doubles. It is exposed and there is no shade at all, so the middle of a summer day is unusable — hot, glaring, and the birds are distant. Autumn and winter are the quiet, atmospheric months, and the mistral can flatten the light and the birds both.

The pans themselves are a protected reserve: you photograph from the road and the marked paths along the tombolo, not from the dykes, and access to the interior is by guided visit only. The western sand-bar road is one-way and closes in storms. Use a long lens and keep your distance — approaching the birds is both prohibited and pointless, because they leave. Check the current access and visit arrangements before the day.