A sustainable heritage is above all a "well-born" material or intangible entity, that is, well thought out, well designed and integrated into its environment.
When Paul Corta, the Member of Parliament for Les Landes, decided in 1858, after the passage to Capbreton of Emperor Napoleon III, to benefit from the granting of a concession to the beach in the form of a modest plot of eight acres, the choice of the site was enlightened by the best geographers of the Second Empire.
At Capbreton beach there is only one perennial arpent sheltered from the assaults of the ocean, far from the quicksand of the old estuary of the Adour: the tuc west of the Vignasse. This concession was twenty years later, transformed into full ownership by authentic deed.
After his father’s death in 1870, Paul Corta became the owner of one-third of the sandlot, and in 1882 he took it into his own hands following the acquisition of shares in his brother and sister. Between 1883 and 1885 he built a four-metre-high observation tower, 12 metres high, at the top of which, in the evening, four oil-laden basins lit up the dunes of Capbreton. To build his remarkable edifice, Paul drew from his quarries at Tercis-les-Bains, materials of the country.
To build a tower, to erect a belfry, is by no means an expression of pretension or vanity, but simply, since the abolition of the privileges of the old regime, it is to exercise its right as a citizen to create, to invent in respect of republican culture. Pigeon houses and turrets blossomed in the Landes from 1790, the year the department was founded.
They existed two other towers of obsevation in Capbreton beach in 1900, that of Doctor Gobert behind the Corta building and a flanking the Bellevue villa, towards the village. The only remaining today is the “well-born” tower.
Built by an artist painter in 1885, succeeding to musician René de Castéra in 1900, the Tower of the beach is still in 2022, the property of a creator.