Pereire

The brothers Emile (1800 - 1875) and Isaac (1806 - 1880) Pereire achieved with the XIXe century in the Landes a considerable work. Grandsons of Jacob Rodrigues Pereira (1715 - 1780), Jewish Portuguese installed in France in 1741 and become the interpreter of Louis XV.

Presentation

They built the railroad of Bordeaux to Bayonne, the line of the west of Paris (St-Germain terminus.) in 1837, financed a network of the agricultural roads wanted by the law of 1857 imposing the systematic of the forest landaise, sown timbering more than 10.000 ha of forests in Pays of Buch and in the Grande Moor and are at the origin of the creation of the Town of Winter of Arcachon in the years 1850, new locality that Napoleon III visited twice.

Birth of the Town of winter of Arcachon

Practically built of only one jet, according to a carefully preestablished town-planning, a new city was born in the years 1860, thanks to the convenient association of a very advised banker and Bacille of Koch: assuaging the Town of winter of Arcachon, with its extravagant villas.

Arcachon is already a Seaside resort famous. The rich person traders of Bordeaux have pinion there on beach. The trains which, since the repurchase of the Bordeaux line - Tests It by the Compagnie of the South, even push from now on to Arcachon, make full the all summer. However, the owners of this railroad company, the Emile brothers and Isaac Pereire, who have just made a success of in Paris the superb real estate transaction of the Parc Heap, are interested much in the area. Their family has been fixed there for one century and they are owners of thousands of hectares of pines.

Emile, that which has the ideas, wonders how to make profitable his small train twelve months out of twelve and, why not, assemble a new real estate transaction at the same time. He has a stroke of genius. The Tuberculose, which one still calls phthisis, makes at the time of the devastations. One tries to put the patients under the best conditions of possible resistance. Only one regulation: good food and, especially, good air. From where the flowering of Sanatorium S in mountain and on the Riviera. There is not of it on the Atlantic coast, considered as too windy. But the medical community arcachonnais for a long time noticed that the sailors and the Résinier S, in spite of hygiene and deplorable living conditions, never contract the disease. A doctor named Pereyra, cousin of the bankers, also notes that while crossing the forest of pines, the marine winds lose of their aggressiveness and that this attenuated oceanic climate would be perfect for the tuberculous ones.

Emile soon will buy the heights of Arcachon and will parcel out them. It will be the Town of winter, left gigantic open sanatorium where the patients will be able to remain with their family, their servants, in bought or rented particular houses furnished. The villas leave ground like mushrooms. All are the different appearances but actually practically built on the same plan, starting from ready-made units. In the same time, town planning goes good progress. A landscaped garden is planted. Streets and alleys are drawn in curve, so that there is never nowhere, of drafts. Lastly, a formidable promotional operation launches the station in the presence of the emperor Napoleon III, of his wife the empress Eugenie and of the imperial Prince, their son. A triumph. Whole world flow the curists. The fame of the Town of winter becomes such as soon, the people in good health settle there too. The hotels are added to the villas. Pereire resells its batches. But its idea will make flora until the Grande depression of the the Thirties. Then, usual customers, desilvered, deserted records of the city, ringing the knell of the golden age of the city.

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