Sunbathers in France have increasingly come face-to-face with wild boars on the hunt for unattended picnics and overflowing seaside bins.
Reports of the animals turning up on the sands along the Côte d'Azur have grown sharply, with campsites, restaurants and coastal holiday properties all reporting difficulties fending off boars that look to topple wheelie bins.
"We're careful. We keep our eyes open," one French tourist told the national television channel from a boar-frequented stretch of sand.
A fellow beachgoer noted that encountering the animals in nearby forests was commonplace, "but it's very rare on beaches."
Despite feeding wild boar being illegal, officials say holidaymakers continue to do so.
In Fréjus, authorities this year imposed fines of up to €450 (£385) on anyone caught offering food to animals, following widespread complaints about damaged flowerbeds in parks and private gardens.
French farmers estimate that boars inflict roughly €90million (£77million) worth of crop damage annually, according to figures from the French Federation of Hunters.
The federation says it is striving to contain numbers, reporting that 881,372 boars were killed during the 2024-25 hunting season.
That figure represents twice the total culled two decades earlier and a twentyfold increase compared with the 1970s.
Officials acknowledge that the animals reproduce at a rate that outstrips hunters' capacity to reduce the population, leaving much of continental Europe struggling to reverse the trend.
Scientists attribute part of the surge to climate change, with milder winters allowing a greater proportion of young boars to survive through to spring.
Critics have pointed to game management strategies introduced in recent decades that were designed to guarantee hunters a steady supply of quarry.
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These practices have included leaving food out for boars in woodland areas and deliberately sparing females and juveniles from culls.
Opponents of the French Federation of Hunters argue that such policies have been counterproductive, enabling the boar population to spiral beyond any realistic prospect of control.
Boars have also become a regular presence along Spain's Costa del Sol, and in Rome, authorities deployed 177 soldiers in 2024 specifically to shoot the animals.
Last month, footage of boars wandering among sunbathers at Torreguadiaro beach in San Roque, southern Spain, spread rapidly across social media.
Residents blamed Andalusian regional authorities for failing to manage rural boar numbers.
The previous summer, the animals were filmed in Malaga taking a dip in the Mediterranean and sheltering beneath a parasol.
In Berlin in 2020, a naked swimmer was photographed pursuing a boar that had snatched his laptop bag beside a lake.
He eventually recovered it after clapping and striking the ground with a stick.
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