Le département de la Gironde est l’un des 5 départements de la région Aquitaine avec le Lot et Garonne, la Dordogne, les Landes, les Pyrénées Atlantiques.

Surface area

The Department of the Gironde is the largest French department: 10,725 km², i.e. almost 2% of the entire French territory. The Aquitaine region notably includes the three largest departments of Metropolitan France (Landes 9,243 km², Dordogne 9,060 km²).
By way of comparison, the surface area of the Rhône department is 3,249 km² while the Bouches-du-Rhône department covers 5,087 km².

Population

The department's total population is 1,376,000 inhabitants (on the basis of the INSEE French national statistical institute estimation for 2005). It is among the 24 departments whose annual average population growth rate increased the most between 1999 and 2005 (1.1%).

Administrative divisions

Communes
The Gironde is divided into 542 communes. The smallest is Castelmoron d'Albret (with 4 hectares, this commune is the smallest village in France in terms of surface area). Hourtin is the largest with 190.5 km² (19,050 hectares, that is to say a surface area almost 5,000 times larger than that of Castelmoron d'Albret). Lartigue has the smallest population (44 inhabitants). Bordeaux of course has the largest population, with 218,948 inhabitants.

Cantons
The department is divided into 63 cantons; the Conseil Général is therefore composed of 63 elected councillors.

Communities of Communes
The Gironde's communes are grouped together into 45 communities of communes, plus the Urban Community of Bordeaux, that is to say 46 Public Establishments of Inter-communal Cooperation.

Pays (Territories)
The department is divided into 8 pays: pays Médoc, pays Bassin d'Arcachon Val de Leyre, pays des Graves, pays Cœur entre deux Mers, pays Haut Entre Deux Mers, pays Libournais, pays des Landes de Gascogne.

Education

• The Conseil Général organises the management of 104 public secondary schools and 28 private secondary schools, receiving 56,000 pupils in the public sector and 10,000 in the private.

• Bordeaux and the Urban Community of Bordeaux (CUB) possess 4 Universities, 4 University Institutes for Technology, 15 Grandes Écoles, several large research bodies and more than 250 laboratories, 65,000 students including 6,500 foreign students and 6,500 researchers and lecturers.

Infrastructures

• With a tonnage of 8.3 Mt in 2007, the traffic passing through the Port of Bordeaux amounts to 40,000 lorries travelling on the roads of the South-West of France. It ranks 6th amongst the large French ports.

• Bordeaux - Mérignac Airport received 3,421,843 passengers in 2007. Its principal destinations are Paris Roissy and Paris Orly Airports, Marseille, Nice and Lyon. As for international flights, it serves numerous European towns such as Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid etc. not to mention numerous charter flights to the Mediterranean basin and Quebec.

• Bordeaux-Saint-Jean railway station receives 10 million travellers in transit each year.

Economy

The Gironde possesses 37,589 establishments, corresponding to a workforce of 346,367 employees. There are 44,897 self-employed workers.

The Gironde, wine-growing and agricultural land:

• The agricultural world is made up of 8,000 farms a large portion of which are linked to the viticultural sector.

• The Gironde wine-growing region is the largest Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée wine-growing area in the world with 57 different guarantees of origin covering 116,000 hectares. It represents 14% of the total French wine-growing area, that is to say 1.5% of the world's total viticultural surface area.

The Gironde, land of tourism:
Tourism represents 8% of GNP (17,600 jobs and 5,000 seasonal jobs).

The Gironde, land of forests:
Almost half of the department's surface area is covered by forest. Accordingly, the forestry sector is composed of 3,500 businesses, providing 8,000 jobs.

The Gironde, land of innovation and high-tech industries:
The department's aeronautical and aerospace engineering business cluster represents 10,700 jobs.

The Gironde, a land "online":

• 130 of the Gironde's communes possess their own Internet sites, that is to say a proportion of 24% at the department level (81% in broadband Internet access).
• 65% of homes in the Gironde are equipped with computers (62% in Aquitaine as a whole).
• 53% of homes in the Gironde possess an Internet connection (50% en Aquitaine), 44 % have broadband access (41 % in Aquitaine as a whole).