The first Street View images outside America are now available – Street View has come to France!

Added in celebration of the upcoming Tour de France, the street view images are mostly restricted to the race route (rather than allowing you to explore whole cities).

However, there is lots to see, including the most classic of sights: The Eiffel tower¹.

Street View cars have been spotted all over Europe, so other countries are no doubt on the way.

In the meantime, let us know what you find in France and, if you speak French, make sure you’re subscribed to Google Sightseeing Français.

Thanks: Google Maps Mania

We’re continuing the first annual GSS Desert Week! In time-honoured tradition, we’ll mostly be posting about deserts. For about a week.

Whilst not technically a desert, The Great Dune of Pyla (or Pilat), France, is without doubt the largest sand dune in Europe. The dune is around 500m by 3km and up to 117 metres tall, totaling about 60,000,000 m³.

Worryingly, the massive sand dune isn’t content to stay put, and seems hell-bent on swallowing up the forest and anything else that gets in its way. In tandem with coastal erosion, the dune is advancing inland at a rate of around 5 metres a year – which, multiplied by the dune’s length means that up to 15,000m² of forest is being lost every year.

Roads and several houses have already been obliterated by the dune’s progress, and if its progression continues at the same pace, in 40 year’s time the Biscarrosse road and campsite will too have been lost forever.

See the Great Dune of Pyla’s official website for more info (where they also have a good gallery of photos clearly showing the forest being consumed by sand), or read the painfully factual Wikipedia page.

Ville de Bordeaux is a carrier vessel that has been specially designed to transport various pieces of the Airbus A380 around the globe.

Given that the A380 is the largest passenger airliner in the world, it’s no surprise that the ship which carries it has its own world record (although it’s not as exciting) – Ville de Bordeaux has the largest ever watertight stern door on a ro-ro¹ vessel!

Collecting pieces from manufacturing sites in Germany, Spain and Wales, Ville de Bordeaux can be seen here docked at Bordeaux’s Pauillac terminal, where she drops off the various plane parts. Look closely and you’ll see the cargo door is open, and an aircraft fuselage has been rolled across the pontoon and transferred onto a barge.

This is actually one of two specially built semi-submersible barges which collect the cargo before heading south down the river to Langon, where the aircraft is unloaded for road-transport to Toulouse for final assembly (where, as previously posted, you can see the finished product).

You can follow the full story of A380 transport on the Google Earth Community. There’s also ground level pictures of Ville de Bordeaux on Flickr or see where she is right now with Vessel Tracker.

Thanks to Rene73.

Here we see the Paris Fire Brigade in action- they’ve blocked off this road and are completing what can only be a daring rescue of a cat from a rooftop (well, do you seen any smoke from a fire)?

Rue de Lafayette, where this action is taking place, is a one-way street, so the local police department (the “Prefecture of Police“) only needed to block the road at one end.

But a lost cat isn’t the only reason for the Parisian police to close streets – a connecting lane behind the US Embassy has also been blocked at both ends.

Submitter DDA reckons this could be during a heightened state of security alert, France’s “Vigipirate“. Which, I was disappointed to discover, has nothing to do with vigilante pirates, but instead is a threat level indicator similar to the homeland security levels in the US.

However, where the American threat levels go from predictable green (safe) to red (danger) the French system skips out green to start at yellow, running up to red (danger) and then scarlet (even more danger)!

The increased security at the embassy could mean that when this picture was taken the French government had stepped it up to red level.

Thanks to DDA to Fred.

North of the Chinese city of Hangzhou, a brand new housing development is taking shape in an unusual style. At least unusual for China anyway, as Tianducheng is designed to look like Paris, France! There are currently just 2000 residents living in the development, but its eventual capacity will be around 100,000.

Hoping to bring the ‘European Lifestyle’ to China’s growing number of wealthy residents, the 31 km² development features several reproductions of famous Parisian landmarks, including the Eiffel Tower and Arc de Triomphe. At 108 metres, Tianducheng’s Eiffel Tower is the second largest replica of the Eiffel Tower in the world¹ – roughly one third the height of its Parisian namesake.

The development has large landscaped gardens containing several ornate fountains, and from the few photographs of the development available online it would seem likely that in the next thumbnail you can see the Bassin de Latone, which is a copy of the one in the Palace of Versailles’ garden.

As we have seen, there are replicas of specific landmarks here, although much of the design seems to be an amalgam of Parisian architectual styles, so it’s really interesting to compare the two. This video shows just how much work has gone into Tianducheng, and Reuters has a great photo slideshow.

Finally, it should be pointed out that Tianducheng is not the only such European-style development – in Shanghai they’re also building Thames Town (only partial high-resolution), which is modelled on a typical English town, and apparently Italian and German versions are planned elsewhere too!

Thanks to GEforumprofr at the Google Earth Community.

Read this article in Italian