The causes which would in general be likely to keep a mountain range for long within the realm of fable, such as the absence of low passes, or of longitudinal valleys reaching into the heart of the chain, its situation away from the lines of communication betwen nations, and the fact of forming a political frontier between them, and lastly the sway of fashion, have all operated with special force in the case of the Pyrenees.
—The Geographical Journal, 18941
In Perigrinación del mundo (Pilgrimage of the World, 1680) the seventeenth-century Spanish missionary Dr. Pedro Cubero Sebastián warns his readers to beware of the “Pyrenean Mountains, so celebrated amongst the ancient Cosmographers, so harsh to pass through . . . whose summits appear to be sliding apart so as to fall on those passing through them; nothing else is to be found there, except the cadavers of dead men who lost their lives as a result of the rigorous weather, or because some hard boulder served as their shroud; there is no doubt that it makes one’s flesh creep to cross them.”2 Cubero’s hyperbolic evocation of these horrors was not unusual; mountains were frequently described in similar terms by European travelers in this period. But his description of the Pyrenees as a landscape that was “so harsh to pass through” echoed a familiar theme that many writers have evoked in writing about the Pyrenees. For much of their history the Pyrenees have been depicted as an impenetrable “wall,” a barrier to human movement or a strategic barrier between tribes, civilizations, empires, and states. Such imagery, through constant repetition, has tended to define the Pyrenees as a landscape of desolation, difficulty, and inaccessibility that fully bears out the old French depiction of the mountains as a “savage frontier.”
Modern travelers have tended to imbue the Pyrenees with more positive qualities. In his classic memoir of his climbing expeditions in the “enchanted mountains” of the Maladeta massif in the 1950s, the British diplomat Robin Fedden wrote of “that unreality, that sense of a landscape under a spell, which travelers have repeatedly noted in these Pyrenees.”3 To the English politician Harold Spender, who traveled through Andorra and the Central Pyrenees in the late nineteenth century, “There is something almost unearthly about the high mountain landscapes of the Pyrenees. You have no gentle foreground to diminish the savagery of the mountains. . . . You are in the mountains of the moon—on a crust that is already growing cold. It is the fantastic landscape of a dream.”4 In The Mountain (1872), the French historian Jules Michelet contrasted “the fantastic loveliness of the Pyrenees . . . those strange and seemingly incompatible sites which are harmoniously bent together by an inexplicable stroke of fairy enchantment,” with “the savage horror of the great mountains which lurk in the rear, like a monster hidden beneath the mask of a youthful beauty.”5
Whether imagined positively or negatively, these evocations of the “savagery” of the Pyrenees are a response to the peculiarities and particularities of the Pyrenean landscape itself, and they are also a reflection of the assumptions that these travelers brought with them, to a mountain range that has been endlessly imagined and reimagined ever since it first began to attract the attention of the outside world. Classical geographers believed that the Pyrenees took their name from Pyrene, the virginal daughter of King Bebryx, who was raped by a drunken Hercules on his way to fight the monster Geryon. In his poetic history of the Punic Wars, the Roman poet Silius Italicus describes how Pyrene flees into the mountains afterward only to be torn apart by wild beasts. When Hercules wakes up from his drunken stupor, he is so filled with remorse that he resolves to find Pyrene’s remains and bury them. As the repentant hero gathers Pyrene’s mangled limbs, he calls out her name till, “the high mountain-tops, smitten by his cries, were shaken; with loud lament he called Pyrene by name; and all the cliffs and haunts of wild beasts echoed the name of Pyrene.”6
Other geographers and historians traced the origins of the Pyrenaei Montes to the Celtic word pyren, or pyrn, meaning “high mountain.” Some believed that the Pyrenees took their name from the ancient Greek king Pyrrhus, who supposedly blasted passes through the mountains and burned their forests to clear roads. In Bibliotheca historica, written between 60 and 30 BCE, the Greek geographer-historian Diodorus Siculus claimed that the Pyrenees were created by an enormous fire lit by ancient herdsmen that consumed the entire mountain range and left a legacy of “many streams of silver” and “many thick and deep forests” that were still present in his own time.7
The location and the extent of the Pyrenees were also disputed. Herodotus believed that Pyrene was a city rather than a chain of mountains. The Greek geographer and historian Strabo compared the Iberian Peninsula to “a hide stretched out in length from west to east, the forepart [neck] towards the east, its breadth being from north to south,” and described—inaccurately—how “this chain of mountains stretches without interruption from north to south, and divides Keltica from Iberia.”8 As late as the sixteenth century, Spanish chroniclers traced the origins of the Pyrenees to a man-made conflagration that had covered the mountains with forests and exposed deposits of silver and other precious metals.
The Arab historian of Moorish Al-Andalus Ahmed ibn Mohammad al-Makkari (1578–1632) describes the Pyrenees as “the mountain barriers which there divide Andalus from the continent, where many different languages are spoken. These mountains have several passes or gates, which a Grecian king ordered to be opened in the rock with fire, vinegar and iron, for before his time there was no communication whatsoever between Andalus and the continent.”9 Even then, al-Makkari was not entirely certain about the geographical location or direction of the Pyrenees, describing their passes as facing Majorca and Minorca, in other words, east rather than south.
Prehistory
It is little more than two hundred years since geologists, geographers, and scientists first began to place the Pyrenees within the overall history of the earth’s surface. We now know that the range came into existence as a result of the lifting and folding process that geologists call orogenesis, specifically the Variscan or Hercynian orogeny, which took place between 370 million and 290 million years ago, when the Iberian microcontinent rotated and ground itself against the southwestern promontory of the Eurasian continental plates. Over millions of years these enormous tectonic pressures crushed the softer sedimentary Iberian plate against the harder crystalline rocks that still dominate the Pyrenean uplands, resulting in the emergence of the 500-mile (800-kilometer)-long Cantabrian-Pyrenean chain some 100 million to 150 million years ago, during the Lower Cretaceous period.
Between 35 million and 40 million years ago, a second collision lifted the Cantabrian-Pyrenean chain a second time. This was followed by yet another movement 11 million years ago, which may have added approximately 3,300 feet (1,000 meters) to the Pyrenees over a period of 10 million years. These titanic ructions in the earth’s crust created a range of mountains that stretches some 270 miles (435 kilometers) long and 80 miles (130 kilometers) wide at their widest point, which begins almost imperceptibly at the Cantabrian mountains on the Atlantic and continues to Cap de Creus on the Mediterranean coast. In reality the Pyrenees consist of two ranges. The first begins just inside the Atlantic coast and proceeds south and east toward the Val d’Aran, where another begins slightly to the south and tapers off at the Mediterranean. Weathering and erosion have shaped the landscape still further, shaving and wearing the limestone that predominates on the southern side of the range to produce sharp ridges and spiky, razor-like rock formations that can easily slice legs and hands.
Evidence of these convulsions can be found from one end of the mountains to the other: in the piles of boulders tumbling down from mountainsides that the French call le chaos; in the epic confusion of rocks crushed together above the Gavarnie Cirque in a mind-bogglingly complicated combination of stratifications, whorls, and fault lines that the nineteenth-century cartographer Franz Schrader once described as a “geological poem”; in the pale limestone karst formations of Navarre and Aragon that have been sharpened, scooped, and hollowed out by wind and water into weirdly other-wordly shapes and forms; in the enormous rocks as high as trees that suddenly loom up in the middle of forests like pieces of meteorite fallen from the sky.
Though Pyrenean glaciation is part of the same Würm ice sheet that also covered the Alps during the third phase of the Quaternary Ice Age some seventy thousand years ago, glaciation is less extensive in the Pyrenees. Unlike the Alps, the Pyrenees have few large glacier-fed lakes in their lower valleys, but water is ubiquitous in the mountains, from the rivers, streams, and waterfalls to the small lakes, or tarns, that break up the desolation of the high mountains on both sides of the range. Most of the great Pyrenean waterfalls are on the French side, such as the six or seven streams that converge in a boiling, foaming cauldron from all directions beneath the Pont d’Espagne, before crashing downward toward the former spa town of Cauterets. Tectonic activity has also given the Pyrenees an abundance of thermal waters and underground streams, which have hollowed out some of the largest caves in Europe.
The historic reputation of the Pyrenees as an inaccessible wall is not due to their height. The Pyrenees are smaller than the Alps and smaller than other European mountain systems. Stendhal once called them “pigmy mountains” and joked that he was unable to find them.10 The highest peak in the range is the Pico d’Aneto, at 11,168 feet (3,404 meters), which is smaller than Mulhacén, at 11,413 feet (3,478.6 meters), Spain’s highest mountain, in the Andalusian Sierra Nevada, while the Alps have more than a hundred peaks of more than 13,000 feet (3,962 meters). Unlike the Pyrenees, the Alps have rarely been depicted as a barrier, and such imagery is due partly to topography and partly to geography. Look at a relief map of the Alps and you see a scimitar-like formation curving around from Italy toward Austria and Slovenia in a 750-mile (1,200-kilometer) arc broken by a series of longitudinal valleys and incorporating many different ranges.
The Pyrenees, by comparison, effectively sever the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of Europe, with the exception of a few miles at either end of the range. In between lie dozens of lateral valleys that come out at right angles on their northern and southern sides, like ribs protruding from a spine. Apart from the narrow coastal strips at their western and eastern extremes, these mountains are dissected by dozens of cols, or passes, known as puertos—“doors” or “gates” in Spanish—many of which are still difficult to cross in winter. Between these main crossing points there are numerous smaller trails and paths, many of which have been used over the centuries by smugglers, shepherds, and refugees. From a distance, therefore, the Pyrenees can look very much like a giant wall, and this impression is particularly striking from the French side. Approach the mountains from Pau, or farther east from Lourdes and the Ariège, and they cover the horizon, and certainly seem to live up to the French geographer Emmanuel de Martonne’s description of the Pyrenees as “the most massive and unbroken barrier on any frontier in France.”11
The narrow forested valleys that cut into the mountains from the French side do nothing to dispel this impression, as they climb up alongside one of the many rivers, or gaves, toward the waterfalls that tumble down sharply from mountainsides and cliff edges. On the Spanish side, the mountains tend to reveal themselves more gradually as the wide plains give way to foothills that lead up past the great Pyrenean rivers of the Segre, the Gallego, the Cinca, and the Aragon. Approach them from the arid lunar landscape between Zaragoza and Huesca, and the high Pyrenees do not even become visible till you have passed through the massive gash of gnarled red rock near Huesca that leads up into the mountains. The historical image of the Pyrenees as a wall has often been confirmed by the proliferation of glacier-formed cirques known as oules (porridge bowls), which are a distinctive feature of the Central Pyrenees. Anyone who has seen the great rounded cliffs of Gavarnie or the Cirque de Soasa in the Ordesa Canyon in Aragon will immediately see why the Pyrenees have so often been described as a barrier to human movement.
At first sight, these awe-inspiring and intimidating natural barriers seem to bear out the historical reputation of the Pyrenees as a hostile and inaccessible landscape that human beings cross only at their peril. But the rockier and barren highlands are only one component of a landscape that oscillates easily between the savage and the pastoral. In a single day’s walk it is possible to pass from beech and oak forest, through lush valleys filled with sheep and horses, and barren moonscapes scattered with boulders or razor-sharp limestone rocks, before descending vertiginous gorges and canyons that seem incapable of supporting any life at all. Yet just when this desolation begins to feel oppressive and intimidating, you may find yourself walking through grassy meadows and valleys alongside an opalescent stream or mountain lake, enclosed by a cool forest of giant trees.
Once again, these variations are often especially noticeable when crossing from one side of the mountains to the other. On the French side the Pyrenees are generally moist and more verdant, and less directly exposed to the sun, particularly at the western edge of the chain, where the proximity of the Atlantic ensures a generally cooler and moister climate. On the southern side, the impact of Mediterranean winds, or levanters, has created a drier, sundrenched, and rockier landscape populated by fir trees and mountain pines. Cross into Spain from the French village of Lescun and you begin the day walking through ancient decidious forest, lush green meadows, and rolling pastureland. Within two hours the forest begins to thin out and a steep climb leads past the last shepherd’s cabane and brings you into a harsh, inhuman landscape of scree and boulders that fully warrant the old seventeenth-century English descriptions of the mountains as “nature’s dustbin.” From the sharp ridge just below the Petrachema summit, you follow a traverse path into Spain before descending a steep gorge of bleached limestone rock, where everything is sharp, burned, and barren, until finally you emerge back into pine and fir forests that are paler and sparser than their French counterparts.
These differences in climate and terrain have often been evoked by visitors to contrast the “savagery” of the Spanish Pyrenees with the more amenable and domesticated French side of the cain, but such distinctions are not always so clear-cut. Winters are often long and difficult in both the French and Spanish Pyrenees. Until relatively recently, passes on either side of the mountains were regularly blocked by heavy snow, and some of them would once have been impassable for months. Snowfalls, avalanches, and flash floods have long been part of the history of the Pyrenees, which only recently have been tamed by reforestation and the construction of snowbreaks, barriers, and canals. The Pyrenean climate is notoriously unpredictable and unstable, as Edward the Black Prince’s army once discovered when crossing through Roncesvalles to invade Spain.
One evening my friend Steve and I arrived at the refuge below the Brèche de Rolande, near Gavarnie. Shortly before reaching it, we crossed a tiny stream that barely reached above our ankles. That night it poured with rain. The next morning the stream had become a foaming torrent, and the wind was so high that we were advised to go back down and enter Spain through the Puerto de Bujaruelo farther west. For most of the day we made our way across one spating stream after another, in winds that were sometimes strong enough to lean into and tore our maps from our hands.
On another occasion I led a group into the Aragonese Pyrenees. We arrived in temperatures of 93 degrees Fahrenheit (34 degrees Celsius), which had dropped to nearly 43 (6) by the following day, as we walked in thunderstorms and showers of hail.
All these variations and contrasts are part of a mountain landscape that has variously repelled, attracted, and frustrated visitors for thousands of years. Compared with the epic timescales of geologists and paleogeographers, the human presence in the Pyrenees is a minor footnote that can be measured in thousands rather than millions of years. It has been only forty thousand years since the first hunter-gatherers began to settle in the lower Pyrenean foothills, and twelve thousand since their descendants began to shift from hunting game to breeding sheep and cattle at the end of the last Ice Age.
In that short time human beings have transformed the Pyrenees. They have built towns, cities, and villages, roads, bridges, and railway lines. They have constructed reservoirs and channeled mountain lakes and rivers into hydroelectric systems that power some of the great cities on either side of them. They have constructed castles, towns, monasteries, and ski resorts. They have blasted tunnels underneath the mountains and mined iron, copper, and other metals deep inside them and on the surface. Humans have cut down great swathes of forests for timber or firewood, to build ships or open up new pasturelands for sheep and cattle. They have hunted some animals to extinction and introduced new species.
In the course of these long centuries of human settlement, the Pyrenees have also acquired a unique place in European and world history that is not always recognized. “For centuries the Pyrenees have stood aloof from the mainstream of history; a land apart, known only to shepherds, hunters and smugglers,” observed a travel piece in the Daily Telegraph in 2002.12 This is the standard image of the Pyrenees that has been handed on to posterity, and which is frequently evoked in order to give the mountains an aura of historical mystery and touristic allure, but it also leaves out a great deal. For one thing, the Pyrenees have rarely, if ever, “stood aloof” from world history. On the contrary, world history has passed through the mountains on repeated occasions. At various times, the fate of nations and empires has been decided by battles and sieges fought in the Pyrenees. Kings have been dethroned and governments have been brought down by armies that have made their way through remote Pyrenean mountain passes. For a few weeks, in the autumn of 1813, the political future of Europe hung on the epic confrontation waged in the Pyrenean mountain passes of Navarre and the Basque Country.
Both the peculiarities of the Pyrenean landscape and the geographical location of the Pyrenees on the periphery of Spain and France have given their history a very particular shape and texture. On various occasions the mountains have constituted a border between life and death for the refugees, heretics, and dissidents who have crossed from one side to the other to escape war or persecution in accordance with the shifting currents of French, Spanish, and European history. For centuries the Pyrenees constituted the physical dividing line between European Christendom and Islamic Iberia—and the main point of entry for the Christian medieval scholars, monks, and pilgrims who passed through them in search of knowledge or salvation.
Far from being a land apart, the Pyrenees belong very firmly to the histories of the two great states on either side of them, and also to the stream of European and world history. Evidence of these interactions can be found all over the mountains: in ancient images painted on cave walls; in cemeteries containing medieval pilgrims along the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route; in inscriptions written on tombstones in remote mountain villages; in festivals where villagers dress up as bears and virgins; in the delicate stone carving of two angels carrying the Greek letters for the first two letters of Jesus’s name on a twelfth-century Romanesque church built by the people of Assouste for the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage; in the Royalist fleur-de-lys inscribed in lintels that were hammered flat after the Revolution; in the Vive followed by householders’ names in Bearnese villages of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries; in the bizarre sculptures of a man exposing his penis and a woman lifting her skirts that can be found in a church in a village in the Vallée d’Ossau; in abandoned railway lines in the high mountains; in shepherds’ huts and remote hermitages; in commemorative plaques, monuments, and “landscapes of memory” that recall dangerous wartime crossings, flights to freedom, battles, wars, and legendary generals.
It is difficult to think of any mountain range in the world that is so steeped in the past and has been visited so often by the currents of world history. Far from being a land apart, the Pyrenees are a mirror of our world, with all its follies, tragedies, cruelties, and absurdities. The history of the Pyrenees is also a case study in the imaginative creation of a landscape and the different ways in which human beings have projected their fears, desires, and cultural assumptions onto the natural world—and onto mountain landscapes in particular. Artists, poets, and writers have all responded to the peculiarities of the Pyrenean landscape. Some came to the mountains to sculpt and paint and have left their mark on the landscape in the form of carvings, paintings, frescos, and churches of exquisite beauty. Others brought back images and descriptions to the outside world, which became part of the imaginative reinvention of the Pyrenees from the eighteenth century onward.
In the same period scientists, climbers, and explorers began to penetrate the Pyrenees. Their journeys and explorations broke down the myths, fables, and ignorance that had surrounded the mountains for centuries, and their writings also became part of the “discovery” of the Pyrenees by the modern world. Tourists and travelers; Picasso and Charles Rennie Mackintosh; Leon Trotsky and Rudyard Kipling; visitors to Pyrenean spa towns; Catalan nationalist poets and hikers; French cyclists on the Tour de France; esoteric Nazi researchers in search of the lost treasures of the Cathars; smugglers and shepherds—all these visitors have left the footprints that this book will now follow.