The Rhône delta grows. Where most European coastlines retreat, the river's silt still pushes the shore outward, and roughly 930 square kilometres of lagoon, reed bed and grazing marsh sit between its two arms. Roman surveyors drained the margins. Medieval monks diked the rest. In 1248 Louis IX sailed for the Seventh Crusade from Aigues-Mortes, a port built on mud so that France might touch the Mediterranean. The ramparts survive. The harbour silted shut, and the water took the land back. Camargue Safari 4x4 tours exist because this ground refuses ordinary roads. Beyond the dike tracks the surface is sansouire — a crust of salt-tolerant glasswort over soft clay that turns to slip in a single hour of rain. Herdsmen crossed it on horseback for centuries. The gardians who still work the manades ride Camargue horses, a small hardy breed foaled dark brown and turning white only in the fourth or fifth year, and they drive the raço di Biòu bulls with a wooden trident. Their houses, the cabanes, face north with a rounded wall to break the mistral. Protection came late and then came thoroughly. The Réserve Nationale de Camargue was declared in 1927 around the Étang de Vaccarès, the delta's largest brackish lagoon; the Parc naturel régional followed in 1970; UNESCO added a biosphere reserve designation the same decade. Greater flamingos breed on an artificial island at the Fangassier salt pan, several thousand pairs in a good year, feeding on brine shrimp that give the plumage its colour. Rice arrived in quantity after 1942 and now shares the plain with the salt works at Salin-de-Giraud, where evaporation basins run rust-red with Dunaliella algae each August. A guided Camargue 4x4 wildlife tour — a safari 4x4 en Camargue, in local usage — threads between all three land uses. What the delta offers is not scale but edge. Freshwater meets salt within metres; a bund separates a rice paddy from a lagoon holding avocets, black-winged stilts and, in late summer, flocks of glossy ibis. Roughly 400 bird species have been recorded here, more than a third of them nesting. Beavers returned to the Rhône channels. Coypu never left. Read against that long argument between river, sea and human dike, a Camargue Safari 4x4 tour is less an excursion than a short lesson in how the ground was made.