On 29 April 1882, Alphonse Daloz [fr] created the first subdivision within the cape's area and called it Paris-Plage, following advice of the late Hippolyte de Villemessant, editor-in-chief of Le Figaro.

[23] The earliest traces of human presence in the vicinity of Le Touquet are estimated to be from 240,000 years ago, based on the age of stone tools left by nomads near what is today Étaples.

[8] That year, a Belgian buyer called Doms agreed to buy a total of 1,600 ha (4,000 acres) of land for 80,000 francs (c. €252000 in 2022), but the sale was annulled because he failed to pay the promised sum.

This included, among others, three hotels, seven restaurants and cafés, two pharmacies, two bakeries producing local bread, three butchers, a liquor store, a hairdresser's salon, a photographic studio, two bookshops, two coal depots, a public bath, a school and a church.

The Daloz were receptive to Whitley's buyout offer, but the price for the remaining 1,200 ha (3,000 acres) lot was too high for the English investor, so he decided to buy a smaller patch of land (3 km (1.9 mi) long and 500 m (1,600 ft) wide) to the south of the settlement.

6,000 Belgian refugees fleeing the Western Front settled in the commune, the municipal administration of the town of Ypres moved to Le Touquet,[63] while emptied hotels became Allied forces' military hospitals with a total capacity of 3,400 beds.

[64] Some of psychiatrists there were instrumental in early research into post-traumatic stress disorder, as evidenced by the fact that Charles Myers first used the term shell shock in scientific literature in 1915, when he published a case study about three soldiers he was treating in a casino in Le Touquet.

[68][69] Even though Le Touquet was a relatively small municipality, it was so rich that it covered all the expenses of building the new grandiose neo-Renaissance city hall (also opened in 1931) from one-year revenue from gambling taxes alone.

A certain revival for the wider region came with the democratisation of leisure as the right to two weeks' paid leave was assured by the Matignon Agreements in 1936, but Le Touquet essentially remained an upper-class British resort.

In 1943, they launched Operation Starkey, a sham amphibious landing in the vicinity of Boulogne and Le Touquet, but it failed to reach the intended goal of diverting German soldiers from other fronts to northern France.

[89] German defences thinned over the summer as Allied forces advanced in northern France, until the Wehrmacht finally abandoned the city on 4 September, but not before blowing up the two lighthouses from 1852 and the bridge over the Canche at Étaples.

[5] Le Touquet is squeezed between the left (south-western) bank of the estuary of the Canche river and the English Channel coast, in the western part of the Pas-de-Calais department in the north of France.

That accumulation may sometimes cause problems because it makes the estuary shallow and forces the river to meander, with the potential to jeopardise commercial activity of the port of Étaples and Le Touquet's marina if unregulated.

In comparison to France as a whole, Le Touquet features a relatively cold, rainy and cloudy climate,[122][123] but average temperatures are warmer than in cities in the middle of the continents at the same latitude, such as Kyiv, Astana or Calgary.

[142] Le Touquet belongs to the Communauté d'agglomération des Deux Baies en Montreuillois (CA2BM), an intercommunality created in January 2017 with the seat in a small inland town of Montreuil-sur-Mer.

[145] A unit called Agence d'attractivité en Opale-Canche-Authie is a tourist board for the local region, and is separate from CA2BM, but a Cour des Comptes report in 2020 found it to be in organisational chaos, not least because its precise role is unclear.

[157] However, since Emmanuel Macron's election to the presidency in 2017, his native city of Amiens and Le Touquet became Macronist strongholds,[158] though right-leaning parties (except the far-right National Rally) still get relatively more support.

[168] In 2023, the commune unveiled plans to build a 90-room social housing complex for students and seasonal workers and as well as accommodation for the Republican Guards to deter illegal immigration, but the time of completion is yet to be announced.

To the city centre's east is the forest area, which consists of villas, some as old as the town itself, whose owners are mostly upper-class (company executives, members of liberal professions and retirees who used to be either of those) and for whom the house is a secondary residence.

[192] The Cercle Internationale du Touquet, organised by Stoneham, Coubertin as well as Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia and some French aristocrats, contributed greatly to the development of the sport.

[68] The pool was badly damaged during World War II, but was restored to service in 1950 and stayed in the pre-war configuration until 1985, when rising maintenance costs prompted the commune to convert the area to a water park.

Henri Demoury, a miller in the Aisne, discovered the sport while on the Flemish coast and quickly switched to renting out land sail equipment and engineering some of his own, first starting in nearby Merlimont.

[212] Because the town hosted the cycling race, Le Touquet is eligible to promote itself with a "Bicycle City" (Ville à Vélo) label by Tour de France (one of 133 municipalities in the world).

[213][214] According to another assessment, the Baromètre des villes cyclables [fr], a national survey of bicycle usage and safety, Le Touquet's grade in 2021 on the scale from 1 to 6 (higher is better; averaged to 3.50) was 4.22 ("favourable conditions"), the third-best result in the Hauts-de-France region among 115 rated communes.

Pérard says that during German occupation, he bought some leftovers from a fish market in Boulogne and prepared a crude soup out of them, and then used some of the initial broth for refinement with herbs and onions and repeated the cycle until he was confident that his final version, with sea molluscs and saffron, would be popular.

The first request for a railway concession came in 1892 to build a "tramway",[n] but the investor had to back out in 1895 because they had problems with buying out land, choosing the power source (horses or electricity) and because the bridge over the Canche river was too narrow to accommodate the new line.

[234] The new company, the Société du Tramway d'Étaples à Paris-Plage (EP), which grouped investors under the leadership of Banque Adam [fr], a local financial institution, quickly resolved these problems and opened a metre-gauge electrified train line on 15 July 1900.

[237] As World War II was approaching, the tram connection was gradually being replaced by buses during off-peak hours, but it was the German invasion of France that finished the railway, as repairing the damages the assault brought was not economically viable.

[252] In September 2023, the Ministry of the Interior announced that policemen, who are headquartered in the town hall, would get an enlarged police station in the old gendarmerie building for €6 million, and that ten gendarmes with horses would arrive in summer of 2024 for immigration enforcement purposes.

[267] From 2011 to 2014, Opal Coast residents could watch Opal'TV [fr], but its unprofitability led to its quick closure, bankruptcy, and later acquisition by Wéo, a subsidiary of La Voix du Nord.