Cabourg is a commune in the Calvados department in the
Basse-Normandie region of France. Cabourg belongs to the Paris
Basin. The commune is located next to the sea and the back
country is a plain, favourable to the cereal culture. But the
modern Cabourg began in 1853 with the arrival of two Paris
financiers in search of a new site for a luxurious
watering-place. The railway age had made the Normandy coast
accessible to holiday-makers; Dieppe, Trouville and Deauville to
the east had already been discovered; but here the adventurers
found a virgin expanse of barren dunes and level sea-sands ripe
for development. By the 1880s an unreal city of villas and
hotels had arisen, in a semicircle whose diameter was the
seafront, whose centre was the Grand Hotel, and whose radii were
traced by a fan-work of avenues shaded with limes and Normandy
poplars |