Adour

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Adour
Adour-fr.png
Data
Water code FR :  Q --- 0000
location France , Occitania and Nouvelle-Aquitaine regions
River system Adour
source Pyrenees , municipality of Aspin-Aure
42 ° 55 ′ 51 ″  N , 0 ° 19 ′ 4 ″  E
Source height approx.  1580  m
muzzle at Bayonne in the Atlantic Ocean Coordinates: 43 ° 31 '48 "  N , 1 ° 31' 28"  W 43 ° 31 '48 "  N , 1 ° 31' 28"  W
Mouth height approx.  0  m
Height difference approx. 1580 m
Bottom slope approx. 5.1 ‰
length approx. 308 km
Catchment area 16,912 km²
Reservoirs flowed through Lac de Payolle
Medium-sized cities Tarbes , Dax , Bayonne
Small towns Bagnères-de-Bigorre , Aire-sur-l'Adour , Saint-Paul-lès-Dax , Boucau
Navigable from the estuary to Port-de-Pouy
Bridge in Aire-sur-l'Adour

Bridge in Aire-sur-l'Adour

The Adour ( Aturri in Basque ) is a river in southwest France that runs through the regions of Occitania and Nouvelle-Aquitaine .

course

The river has its source in the French Pyrenees , south of the Col d'Aspin , in the municipality of Aspin-Aure . After crossing the Lac de Payolle reservoir , it initially bears the name Adour de Payolle and only takes its final name after it has merged with its left tributary Adour de Gripp . It first drains generally in a north-west and north-westerly direction, then turns to the west and flows into the Atlantic Ocean at Bayonne after around 308 kilometers .

The Adour flows through the Hautes-Pyrénées and Gers departments in the Occitania region and the Landes and Pyrénées-Atlantiques departments in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region.

muzzle

Estuary at Bayonne

The mouth of the river was not always at Bayonne. At the beginning of our era, it poured into the Atlantic at Capbreton , about 15 km north of today's estuary. In 910 it flowed at Port-d'Albret, today's Vieux-Boucau-les-Bains , about 30 km north of the current estuary. In 1164 the river broke through the dunes at Bayonne for a short time, only to pour back into the sea at Capbreton 10 years later, followed again by Port-d'Albret in 1390.

When Bayonne sank in the sand and threatened to perish, King Charles IX ordered. to dig a trench through the dunes near the city, which would become the port to the sea. The work was completed by the citizens in the mid-1550s under Henry II and under the direction of the architect Louis de Foix.

On October 28, 1878, the Adour plunged, reinforced by a flood of its tributary Nive , into a breach that the people of the newly built municipality of Boucau had dug in the dunes and which they called nouvelle bouche (new opening). The old Port-d'Albret was renamed Vieux-Boucau and Bayonne was revived. You just had to keep the new passage free and keep the effects of wind, sand and sea in check.

navigability

The Adour is passable by ships over a length of 72 kilometers from its mouth to Port-de-Pouy . Its tributaries Gaves Réunis, Bidouze, Aran, Ardanavy and Nive are also navigable a few kilometers upwards and form a closed shipping area with the Adour. However, in some sections the fairway is no longer maintained, so that unsafe shipping conditions arise in particularly poorly rainy summers. Much of the route is influenced by the tides .

Since the Middle Ages, goods have been transported on the Adour from inland, especially wine from Aquitaine; today are the products on it Gascogne , especially corn, shipped.

Tributaries

Left tributaries:

Right tributaries:

Places on the river

Web links

Commons : Adour  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b geoportail.fr (1: 16,000)
  2. ↑ a b c The information on the length of the river and the catchment area are based on the information on the Adour from SANDRE (French), accessed on January 31, 2011, rounded to the nearest kilometer.
  3. ↑ L'Adour: histoire, geographie et détournement ( Memento of January 2, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (history, geography and river course changes (French))