Port Camargue at sunset, and the cameras that stay up all night
At 19:24 local time on 8 October the beach camera at Le Grau-du-Roi wrote its last frame of the day and stopped. The sun is just above the water in it, flattened and orange, with the dunes and the beach path in the foreground, two people out on the sand, and the breakwater of Port Camargue running off to the right with a beacon on its end and the first masts behind. Sunset there that day was 19:14 (sunrise-sunset.org for 43.5179, 4.1250), so the camera watched it go down, gave it ten more minutes and went to sleep. When I fetched the feed at 01:12 UTC this morning that was still the newest frame.
Counted from our own camera table at 01:12 UTC on 2026-10-09, six live cameras sit within 15 km of the marina and fourteen within 40 km, all of them on the France pages. They do not keep the same hours as each other, which turns out to be the useful thing to know about them.
The marina from above, in one circle
Port Camargue Marina is the one to open first, and it is not really a frame at all. It is a Roundshot, so what it serves is a full turn: the file I pulled at 01:16 UTC today is 15,680 pixels wide and 2,048 tall, and it runs from the dunes and the open sea, through the sun, round past the beach to the marina basins, where several hundred masts stand in rows and the white apartment terraces step down to the water with a berth at the end of each garden. Zoom into the eastern third and you can count boats.
That panorama carried the timestamp 19:00 on 8 October when I asked for it this morning, and the files arrive on ten minute marks. The camera does not try to work after dark, and a timestamp that has stopped moving is how it says so.
What it looks down on went up from 1969. The culture ministry's heritage notice for the port carries the dates: construction campaigns in 1969 and 1977, the capitainerie built by Jean Balladur in 1973, and the quay ensemble at the quai d'honneur dated 1975 to 1977. It also settles something the port's own history blurs, and which I repeated here first time round: Port Camargue was commissioned by the Nimes chamber of commerce, and is not strictly a station of the Mission Racine, the state coastal scheme of the 1960s, although it was treated as one from 1968. Balladur was chief architect of the port and Espiguette zone, and he did La Grande-Motte too, six kilometres along the same beach, where the pyramids are on the skyline of the next camera west. Same architect, two ports, one view.
The one that stays awake
The second Le Grau-du-Roi camera sits at the same coordinates as the sunset one and faces a different way, and it does not stop at dusk. Its frame was written at 01:09 UTC, two minutes before I asked for it, and shows the coast drawn out along the horizon as a broken line of orange points, black water underneath, the nearer harbour lights doubling themselves in it. Nothing happens. That is rather the appeal at three in the morning.
Carnon and Palavas do the same thing differently. Port de Carnon, 13 km west, switches to a monochrome night mode and prints the clock in the corner: at 03:11 local it had the channel between the two quays, the lamp posts laid out in a curve, their reflections running down the water, one boat moored under the near wall. Palavas-les-Flots, 16 km west, keeps its beach floodlit all night, so at 03:10 the sand was bright and raked and completely empty, with the harbour entrance lit up on the right and the town strung along to the left.
West to the boatyard
La Grande-Motte Port Ouest is the second Roundshot, 7,848 by 1,024, and it points across the working end of the port rather than the pretty end. Catamarans up on their cradles, the sheds of the Outremer yard with the name along the roofline, cranes, a yard of hardstanding, and then the pyramids rising behind the trees. Its last panorama of 8 October is stamped 19:10.
The public camera on the same yard ran later, to 20:01, which is 47 minutes after the sun had gone, and the frame it finished on is the better one: the cloud base lit from underneath in orange over the sheds, the hulls going grey, the lights not yet on. If you want one picture of the Languedoc coast in October, it is that one.
So the three daylight cameras here stopped at 19:10, 19:24 and 20:01 on the same evening, within an hour of each other and not together, because each one has its own idea of how dark is too dark.
When to open them
Sunrise at Le Grau-du-Roi today is 07:49 local, from the same source as the sunset above, and the daylight cameras come back somewhere around then. Mid-morning is when the marina moves, since boats leaving Port Camargue have to come down the channel past the breakwater and both Grau-du-Roi cameras see it. The evening is the sunset, and in October it arrives early enough to catch before dinner.
Two cameras the marina runs are not on our map yet. The port embeds three: the beach Roundshot we index, a live stream from the capitainerie carried on Viewsurf, and a second Roundshot on the Impérial that looks at the old lighthouse and the channel. I asked that third one for its current panorama at 13:06 UTC on 2026-10-10 and it handed back a file stamped 19:50 on 17 September, three weeks old, so the beach camera is the one worth your click. We are going to put the capitainerie stream into the ingest, because a live video feed of a harbour entrance is worth more than another still.
The delta itself is the hole. Arles has no live public camera within 20 km of it on our map, counted this morning, and the étangs between the two arms of the Rhône, where the flamingos and the white horses actually are, have nothing public that we have found. If you know of a camera out there with an address that does not move, send it and I will put it in.