In Lège-Cap-Ferret, in Gironde, a plan for an 18-hole golf course is dividing the municipality. It would be built where a huge firebreak was cut this summer, as an emergency measure, to prevent the spread of wildfires.
The firebreak was not created as a recreational area. It was opened as an emergency measure to prevent fires from spreading across the Cap-Ferret peninsula.
Other projects under study envision a different purpose for this tract. They propose turning it into agricultural plots, with sheep farming or potato crops, for example.
The question concerns a strip of forest cleared in the middle of summer in order to protect the peninsula. A few months after the fires, could this break be turned into a golf course?
For environmental associations, the project is not welcome. They consider it ill-timed only a few months after the fires, at a time when the peninsula is suffering increasingly from global warming.
Maintaining such a course would, however, require turf, and therefore a great deal of water. Yet water is already scarce on the peninsula.
The course is under study on a plot of about 150 hectares. The firebreak now lies partly on municipal land.
The golf course would be managed by private developers. According to the arguments put forward, this arrangement could save the town money.