We are men who wish to live on our land, which we love deeply, like yourselves. We are men who have created a living community with our families, neighbours and friends, labour and means, traditions and customs, festivals and games, ways of speaking, memories and loyalties to our forebears, and to lose all of these would kill our souls . . . we are men who fear exile . . . we are men of Aragon . . . we are the same as you.
—Open letter from the Municipal Council of Campo, Huesca Province, protesting the construction of a reservoir, 19761
In the Spanish novelist Julio Llamazares’s magnificent novella La lluvia amarilla (The Yellow Rain, 1998), the last remaining inhabitant of the village of Ainielle, in the Sobrepuerto district of Huesca Province in Aragon, tells the story of his life and the life of his village. Alone with the memories that have driven him to the brink of madness, with only his dog to relieve his solitude, Llamazares’s hermit-like narrator lives out his last days among Ainielle’s collapsed houses and overgrown streets, haunted by his wife’s suicide and the memories of the family members and neighbors who have long since died or abandoned the village. With a bleakly poetic lyricism, Llamazares describes the slow collapse of a rural Aragonese community in which “the process of destruction in each house was always the same and always equally unstoppable. First the mold and the damp would silently gnaw away at the walls, before moving on to the roof and then, like a form of creeping leprosy, to the bare skeletons of the roof beams. Then would come the wild lichens, the dead, black claws of the moss and the woodworm, and, finally, when the whole house was rotten to the core, the wind or a heavy snowfall would bring it tumbling down.”
There is a real village called Ainielle in Huesca Province. In 1920 the village had a population of eighty-three inhabitants. It was partly abandoned during the civil war and then gradually drained of its population into the 1950s and 1960s through death and emigration, until its definitive abandonment in 1971. Ainielle is one of hundreds of pueblos abandonados—abandoned villages—in the Aragonese highlands. Some, like Ainielle, are in an advanced state of disintegration. Others are structurally intact but devoid of inhabitants. In some parts of Aragon these villages have become part of the landscape, a melancholy spectacle of ruin and decay that has become a minor tourist attraction in its own right. Whole books and blogs are dedicated to these villages, containing haunting photographs of roofless churches, collapsed buildings, and overgrown village squares, or maps outlining itineraries of ruin. More recently, amateur filmmakers have used drones to photograph these ruins. In Sobrepuerto district, some enterprising holiday companies now offer walking tours of abandoned “villages that remain off the map.”
To some extent the fascination with Pyrenean ruin echoes the phenomenon of “ruin porn” that has been variously applied to Chernobyl, Detroit, or the crumbling cities and abandoned factories of the American rust belt. These spectacles of ruin have acquired very particular metaphorical qualities, whether as symbols of Soviet nuclear hubris and our common nuclear future, cycles of capitalist boom and bust and the withdrawal of the state, or the precariousness of every community and the inevitability of ruin that awaits the human project. The ghost towns of Aragon have their own melancholy symbolism. On one hand these ruined or abandoned villages are a testament to rural communities that were too poor to sustain themselves, or which were unable to survive their encounter with modernity. But these ruins also provide physical evidence of the dramatic social and economic transformation that has taken place throughout the Pyrenees in the last two hundred years, which has drained the mountains of their population on both sides of the frontier and accelerated the disintegration that Llamazares described so powerfully.
Mountains Without People
Depopulation is not a specifically modern phenomenon in the Aragonese Pyrenees. In his history of the political economy of Aragon, Ignacio de Asso describes how the Christians who once fled the eighth-century Moorish invasions “moved with the conquest to the flat plain” in the twelfth century and abandoned their villages “as a result of the harsh conditions, including the inability to feed themselves.”2 Following the expulsion of the Moriscos in 1609–14, many Aragonese villages were abandoned or partially depopulated, though most of them were eventually resettled by Christians. But the most significant movements of people in Pyrenean history have taken place within the last century and a half. From the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries the population of the Western Pyrenees actually increased, according to some scholars, to the point when some 56 percent of the mountains were under pasture and even steep terraces were under cultivation.
Beginning roughly in the second half of the nineteenth century, the population of the Pyrenees began to decline on both sides of the frontier. Between 1856 and 1956 the population of the French Pyrenees fell by 56 percent, and some towns and villages lost more than half their populations as a result of emigration. In the mid-nineteenth century the former province of the Couserans, which now forms part of the Ariège département, had ten thousand inhabitants; today the population is less than fifteen hundred. In the Aragonese Pyrenees, emigration reached a peak in the 1950s and 1960s, and it was in this period when so many villages were drained of their populations. On both sides of the frontier this rural exodus was caused by a combination of push and pull factors: rural poverty and the inability of the traditional pastoral economy to cope with industrially produced goods; and improved transportation and communications links between the Pyrenees and the world below, which brought new opportunities in the form of jobs, higher wages, and access to schools and services in the cities.
In 1953 Pedro Cantero, the bishop of Barbastro, in Huesca Province, complained in a Madrid newspaper that the population of his diocese was less than it had been in the 1850 census—a decline that he attributed to “the asphyxiating lack of communication channels” between towns and villages. Some historians have cited the collapse of the Pyrenean “house system” as another push factor in driving Pyrenean emigration. According to this system, which was prevalent in many parts of the Pyrenees, generations of the same family assumed collective responsibility for the survival of the family unit. Though each individual member of the house was equally beholden to the larger family unit, the family property was generally inherited by the eldest son, who acted as the effective master of the house as a consequence. “Noninheriting” children, by contrast, often lacked any possibility of advancement and sometimes lived as virtual slaves of their own households, or servants of other families.
Marriage sometimes offered an escape from such servitude. In small mountain communities where the choice of wives and husbands was limited, however, noninheriting children, or tiones as they were known in Aragon, were sometimes obliged to marry below their status or leave the village in search of partners. The oppressive and claustrophobic nature of the house system is powerfully described in the novelist Lorenzo Mediano’s La escarcha sobre los hombros (The Frost on His Shoulders, 2012), which describes the disastrous events that ensue in an Aragonese Pyrenean village in the 1930s when the shepherd Ramón’s thwarted love for the daughter of the local patriarch leads him to challenge the authority of the casa (house).
In addition to his lowly occupation, Ramón is also a disinherited sibling, or tion, whose prospects are summed up by the guilt-ridden teacher who becomes his mentor:
When I think of the tiones it breaks my heart, for they’re like a tree’s barren branches. They sit at the same table as their more fortunate brothers, but that’s where all privilege ends. They work sunup to sundown for nothing but basic sustenance, clothing when absolutely necessary and, if it’s been a good year, a little tobacco. And so it goes, day after day, serving first their fathers, then their brothers, then their nephews . . . until they grow old. Then they’ll be given lighter chores, like making honeycomb cells from straw and dung, or caring for children, or collecting firewood kindling . . . And finally, one day, with a sigh of relief, they get to rest forever.3
Such a man cannot marry above his station, and Ramón’s refusal to accept his rejection leads to rebellion and violence. Many Pyrenean tiones chose to improve their prospects through emigration. In France, the introduction of the French Civil Code in 1804 provided an additional incentive to emigration. In recognizing individual property rights and the right of individual inheritance, the new legislation made it possible to divide the “house” into smaller units and threatened to undermine the whole system of primogeniture on which the Pyrenean house system depended. As a result, many families actively pressured “noninheriting” sons and daughters to emigrate and even financed their journeys so that they would not seek to divide the family property.
The Pyrenean Diaspora
Emigration is rarely due to internal push factors alone. It also requires an awareness of better possibilities. In the nineteenth century, young men and women left the Pyrenees to work in Bordeaux, Paris, Zaragoza, or Barcelona, for the same reasons that people will always emigrate: because it was increasingly easier to reach these places and because there was more information available about the opportunities they contained. Jean Louis Matocq left his Bearnese village after World War II at the age of sixteen to work in a restaurant in Paris, and subsequently emigrated to San Francisco in 1958, where he worked in the legendary Trader Vic’s restaurant and went on to become a restaurateur and hotelier in his own right.
Many of the men and women who abandoned the rural villages of Huesca Province went to work in Barcelona. In 1998 more than 15 percent of the population of Huesca Province was living in Barcelona, and the figure was higher than 50 percent from some Pyrenean districts. Others went farther afield, to Canada, Uruguay, Argentina, or the Americas. Following the 1860 gold rush, many Basque shepherds emigrated to the United States to become miners, only to take up sheepherding in Nevada, California, Idaho, and eastern Oregon when these dreams of wealth turned sour. These Basque shepherds were highly regarded by American ranchers and farmers for their ability to find new pastures, preserve their flocks from predators, and ensure that their ewes had the most offspring.
As a result, Basque sheepherders became part of the landscape of the American West. As in the Pyrenees, they spent months alone in the mountains with their dogs, writing arboglyphs—carved inscriptions and drawings on tree bark—to pass the time or leaving the cairns known as “stoneboys,” or arrimutilak, as navigational markers. For much of the twentieth century the sheep industry in Southern California and Nevada was heavily dependent on Basque labor, and it was not until Basque emigration declined in the 1970s that ranchers began to turn to South America in search of shepherds.
Some Basque shepherds arrived penniless and eventually went on to own their own herds. Dominique Laxalt, the father of the Nevadan author Robert Laxalt (1923–2001), arrived in Nevada around 1906 from the French province of Soule to work in the Sierra Nevada and went on to become a sheep and cattle rancher. In his classic memoir, Sweet Promised Land (1957), Laxalt describes the return of his Basque father Dominique to his native village near Tarbes after an absence of forty-seven years. Laxalt’s tender tribute to his sheepherder father is also a celebration of his father’s origins in the Pyrenees, where “the soft, dew-drenched hills of the lowlands had given way to mountains made even more austere by longing shadows, and the villages now were of homes not gaily trimmed in red and green, but of stone, bleak and cold and formidable as fortresses.”4 Laxalt’s description of his father’s return to his village and his reunion with his family after a forty-seven-year absence is one of the most beautiful and moving passages in American writing. It also touches on the bittersweet and often painful experience of abandonment, separation, nostalgia, and loss that is common to emigrants everywhere and which often brings them back to the places they were once obliged to leave.
The Valley of the Americans
Situated in the Couserans region of the Ariège département, the Garbet Valley is not a place that conjures up poverty, emigration, and rural hardship. On a summer’s day the valley is a picture of rustic serenity, as the Garbet River rolls gently down from the mountains above Aulus-les-Bains through a succession of gentle stepped meadows and pastureland flanked by steep, forested hills that are scattered with holiday homes. After a few minutes you reach the village of Ercé, the capital of the Garbet, whose two parallel streets with their beige buildings and pastel-colored shutters add to the valley’s sleepy charm. Only the prevalence of old people and the absence of children give a clue to the history of emigration that has drained the Garbet of its population.
In 1850, 10,000 people lived in the Garbet and neighboring Alet Valleys. Today the population of the two valleys is less than 1,500, of whom 560 live in Ercé itself. In the nineteenth century Ercé was famous for its bear displayers, some of whom traveled far beyond the Garbet with their animals. In 1890 Jean and Joseph Barat, two brothers from Ercé, took three bears to England, where they performed an impromptu dance for Queen Victoria on the “long walk” leading to Windsor Castle on May 5. The queen was so pleased with this performance that she summoned the Barats and their animals to the castle to dance before a royal audience of princes and princesses—an event that made them instantly famous.
Today the only remnant of that past is the “bear museum” in the former village school. The Garbet is known locally as the “Valley of the Americans,” not only because so many emigrants went to live and work in the United States, but because many of them have since returned to live in the valley. The Garbet first began to acquire this reputation during the third great wave of emigration from the Ariège that took place in the postwar years, when a number of residents of the valley went to work in the hotel and restaurant industry in Toulouse, Paris, and the United States. Within a few minutes of walking around the village I met Jean-Pierre Icart, a former chef who worked for forty years in New York on the Upper West Side in clubs owned by the late millionaire hotel owner Leona Helmsley. At one time Icart’s customers included politicians like Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Kennedys, and other members of the New York glitteratti.
Now, like many returned “Americans,” Icart has a summerhouse in Ercé with an allotment and a house in Toulouse. Many of the emigrants who went to work in the United States have followed a similar trajectory. María Perrier is a widow who spent sixty-two years in the States, living in Manhattan, elsewhere in New York State, and Florida, and recently moved back to Ercé following the death of her husband. I spoke to her at the modest house in the village that she shares with her younger sister Madeleine and her brother-in-law Roger, a Breton chef who also worked in New York. A bubbly woman in her eighties, María arrived in New York at the age of twenty-four in 1952, without any English, and quickly got a job as an au pair before working in a restaurant on the Upper West Side. She went on to work in a series of restaurants, including one owned by her French husband, and lived in Westchester County, New York, and Florida. Her sister Madeleine followed her five years later.
Both sisters came from a close-knit, traditional family of five children, with a devoted and loving father who worked as a shepherd and supplemented the family income by making coffins and working as a gravedigger in the local cemetery. Monsieur Perrier tried to keep his family together, but María was insistent, and he eventually agreed to let her leave the village when she reached twenty-one. For the Perrier sisters, emigration provided new opportunities and an escape from the backbreaking labor expected of both women and men in the mountains. At the age of sixteen Madeleine was already spending the summers carrying food up to her brother and uncles in the high pasturelands, bringing back twenty kilos of butter from the stone igloos, or orris, which shepherds once used as refrigeration in the mountains, and spending six to eight hours a day looking after horses. “It was too much,” she recalls. “I was too tired. I was working like a man.”
Like many emigrants, the Perrier children never forgot their homeland or their past throughout their decades away. María first returned to Ercé with her brother five years after leaving for New York, in a black funeral Chevrolet that attracted a great deal of attention in an area where roads were still too small for cars. “When the young people see us with the car, they say ‘Oh my God! Grace Kelly and the Prince of Monaco are here!’” she exclaims. “When my brother gets out of the car the kids are all looking at him, shouting ‘He’s there! It’s the prince from Monaco!’ We had so much fun!”
As I listened to these vivacious women talking with such deep affection about their beloved shepherd father, their childhoods, and the lives they had forged in the United States, I was struck by the courage, optimism, and hope that had led them to make a difficult and painful break with their past and also by the pull of memory that so often leads emigrants to return, transformed, to the world they left behind them. If poverty had forced them to leave their Pyrenean home, they also remembered it fondly, so much so that they had exchanged the relative comforts of New York and Florida for the harsh winters of the Couserans and the safety and security of the small rural community that they had once escaped from.
The Fall and Rise of Jánovas
This strong emotional attachment to a rural past is not unique to the French Pyrenees. Every second week in September, former inhabitants of Ainielle return to picnic and take Holy Communion in the ruins of the Church of Saint John the Baptist—the last remaining intact building in the village. Drive out some forty minutes west of Sabiñánigo along the spanking-new N-260 road known as the Eje Pirenaico (Pyrenean Axis) and you will see a cluster of high roofless stone buildings rising out of the greenery along the banks of the Ara River to your left. Shortly afterward a crudely painted sign announces the drive that leads to the village of Jánovas. Most visitors park their cars at the top of the dirt road and walk across the suspension bridge before turning right down the narrow dirt track that leads into the cluster of stone buildings that rise out of the surrounding greenery.
It’s not until you cross the narrow bridge beyond the old village lavadero (washing place) that you really become aware of the devastation that has made Jánovas one of the most notorious of all Aragon’s abandoned villages. The narrow streets are mostly overgrown, and grass, trees, and bushes burst out through the hollow shells of windowless and roofless homes that once housed animals and people. Beyond the overgrown village square, a dirt road leads to a gutted church containing some faint Romanesque frescos and more recent Orthodox paintings that were painted above the altar when the church was used as a set for the 2002 Spanish film Guerreros (Warriors), about the war in Kosovo.
Jánovas itself looks like a village destroyed by war, and in a way it was. Until the 1950s, it was one of a cluster of villages in La Solana Valley, whose population of some two hundred people made their living mostly from agriculture. In 1951 the Spanish government approved a project to build a dam in the valley. Ten years later, in 1961, the electricity company Iberduero began a series of expropriations and evictions in Jánovas and the sixteen other villages in La Solana Valley, in which some 150 families lost their homes. At that time the company had yet to carry out feasibility tests on the dam, and some villagers from Jánovas refused to leave or accept the meager compensation offered by the company. As a result they were forcibly evicted, and Iberduero then blew up their empty houses to ensure they did not return. Undisturbed by democratic or legal niceties, the company proceeded to chop down orchards and olive trees, block irrigation channels, and cut off the supply of water and electricity to the village. Even then a handful of families refused to leave and the local administration was obliged to keep the school open because children were still living there. On February 4, 1966, an Iberduero employee knocked down the door of the local school, dragged the teacher out by her hair, and threw the last children out onto the street.
Still some inhabitants refused to leave. It was not until 1984—well into the democratic era—that Emilio and Francisca Garcés, the last two inhabitants of Jánovas, left the village. In 2001 a legal report on the dam’s feasibility was finally produced, which found that the project fell short of European environmental standards, though the dam was not rejected officially until 2005. In June 2008 the Spanish Ministry of Environment announced the end of the project, and a protracted bureaucratic process began with Iberduero’s successor, the energy company Indesa, regarding compensation and return of property. When Indesa and Ebro Hydrographic Confederation offered only limited compensation for Iberduero’s expropriations, the former inhabitants began to reconstruct the village by raising funds themselves—a painstaking and difficult enterprise that is likely to last decades and may never be completed.
So far these efforts have brought about the restoration of the village’s former community center, and various diggers and dump trucks are poised to carry out ongoing building work and bring the village back to life even though there is no obvious reason to do so. These works are not financed by the Aragonese regional government. The partial resurrection of Jánovas is exclusively due to the former inhabitants of the village and their descendants, who have continued to honor the resistance of the men and women whose community was destroyed by a dictatorship for the sake of a dam that was never built.
Reconstruction
Jánovas is an unusual example of forced depopulation. Most abandoned Aragonese villages have been reduced to a very similar state of disintegration by the ravages of time and nature, and some of them are also being reconstructed, by new arrivals who have come to the Pyrenees with very different expectations from their original inhabitants. The village of Ibort is situated some forty minutes away from Jánovas, on an isolated dirt road in the Pyrenean foothills off the road from Huesca to Sabiñánigo. To reach it, you have to drive along a mostly dirt road through rows of pine forest with fine views of the Pyrenees to the north and the flat plain that leads to Zaragoza and the Ebro down below. Ibort, like Jánovas, was partly abandoned during the civil war because of its proximity to the front line.
After the war, most of the population returned, but the village was subsequently drained of its inhabitants once again during the great emigratory wave of the 1950s and 1960s. By the early 1970s Ibort had become another crumbling ghost village. In 1986 three people came to live in the ruins and began to reconstruct the village with the assistance of the Aragonese government, which helped organize international summer work camps here. By 2001 there were seventeen full-time residents in the village, who obtained a twenty-year-permit from the local administration to rebuild it. Today Ibort has been almost entirely rebuilt. After the desolation of Jánovas it was a refreshing pleasure to see gardens, orchards, and allotments bursting with fruit, flowers, and vegetables and to hear the sound of dogs and children in its pretty cobbled streets.
Approximately eighty people—some twenty families altogether—live in the village all year round, and Ibort belongs to a network of repopulated villages in Huesca supported by the government of Aragon. All of them are new or recent residents. Ricardo, a bearded, sunburned Spaniard in his late fifties, came here in 1994 after living briefly in a semi-abandoned village in the nearby Sierra de Guara. Originally from Pamplona, he had been looking for a place to settle permanently in the Pyrenees, because “for me the countryside, the mountains, were liberation.”
Ibort has no dominant ideology or lifestyle beyond a general preference for the rural life that its original inhabitants once fled from. Some of its inhabitants, such as Ricardo’s Dutch wife Bernadette, would like to be self-sufficient, but this objective has proven difficult to achieve in practice. Most residents commute to nearby Sabiñánigo and combine their gardens and allotments with part-time or temporary jobs elsewhere. According to Ricardo, none of the former residents of Ibort have shown any desire to live there, though some of them are invited each year on the feast of San Ramón in November, to visit the village and share their memories with the current population. In theory none of these houses can be sold—though some have been—but the legal status of the village remains ambiguous. Ibort has guaranteed private property rights in the village, but only a general contract issued by the administration. As a result the population lives in what Ricardo himself describes as “a very imprecise zone. At a legal level there’s a vacuum, a limbo.”
Repopulated “hippie villages” like Ibort are part of the slow repopulation of the Pyrenees that began in the last decades of the twentieth century. This phenomenon includes “neo-rural” ecologists going back to the land, at least in part, and more well-heeled residents who have bought and restored houses or monasteries in abandoned or semi-abandoned villages. The hills above the Gardet Valley are dotted with the characteristic granges (barns) of the Couserans, with their pyramid-shaped facades laid out in descending steps, each one with its own protruding roof slate, where small farmers who lacked the space for larger herds once kept their animals. Some of them are ruined and abandoned, while others have been refurbished as second homes by French holidaymakers.
In other parts of the Pyrenees, abandoned houses have become holiday homes and investment opportunities for Dutch and British tourists, and hotels, pensions, and bed-and-breakfasts for hoteliers and restaurateurs seeking to revitalize local cooking traditions or take advantage of the relatively recent phenomenon of turismo verde (green tourism) in the Spanish Pyrenees. For some Pyrenean villages, this new influx is the only way they can maintain their population and prevent their communities from disintegration. The population of Senegüé, an ancient village on the main road from Sabiñánigo to Biescas in the Valle de Tena, is inhabited mostly by the few remaining elderly members of the original population, and a sprinkling of incomers who have bought or rented holiday homes. Its inhabitants have worked hard to prevent the village from further disintegration. Largely through their own efforts they have restored the old church and built a fine hanging bridge across the Gallego River, which flows just behind the village. So far this combination of local initiative and second homes has staved off the depopulation that accompanied the entry of the Pyrenees into the modern world, and which has reduced so many Aragonese villages to empty or half-abandoned shells.
Today some 1.5 million people live permanently on both sides of the Pyrenees: a small proportion of the estimated 750 million people who live in mountains worldwide. Like those who came before them, these residents have learned to inhabit a mountain world that can be difficult and demanding as well as pleasurable, and which has never been quite as idyllic as it has seemed to so many visitors. In his collection of stories Pirineos: tristes montes (Pyrenees: Sad Mountains, 2011), the Spanish writer and Pyrenean expert Severino Pallaruelo powerfully evokes the darker and harsher side of the old Pyrenees: a closed and claustrophobic rural world of unwanted pregnancies, isolation, loneliness, madness, and searing village hatreds. In one story two truffle hunters, the last remaining inhabitants of an abandoned village, plot to undermine and kill each other as their village crumbles around them. That world has now gone, and few of those who have come to the Pyrenees in search of second homes or property investments in recent years are likely to remember the reasons why so many of their former inhabitants once abandoned them.
Canfranc
This history of abandonment and disintegration is not entirely due to the encounter between the Pyrenees and modernity. One of the strangest and most haunting Pyrenean ruins can be found at the former International Railway Station of the village of Canfranc, at the Aragonese side of the Somport tunnel between Spain and France. Built in the art nouveau / classical style in the first two decades of the twentieth century, this grandiose building, 790 feet (241 meters) long, is more appropriate for a major European capital than a frontier village whose population has never risen above six hundred inhabitants. With its large central dome and two smaller cupolas at either end, its 300 windows and 156 doors, its obvious abandonment only enhances its magnificent incongruousness against the mountain backdrop. The origins of the station date back to 1853, when a group of Aragonese businessmen and politicians first proposed the construction of a tunnel under the Pyrenees at Somport. Decades of lobbying were required to convince the French and Spanish governments of the commercial advantages of a railway line linking Madrid and Paris, by way of Zaragoza and Pau, that would also act an instrument for the economic regeneration of the Aragonese highlands.
In 1882 the influential Spanish politician Joaquín Costa issued a manifesto in support of the project in which he declared, “Through the railway at Canfranc Spain enters modern life.” By 1893 the railroad had reached Jaca on the Spanish side, and the arrival of the “civilizing machine,” as the local press called it, intensified the demand to extend it farther northward. These demands were a reflection of the new spirit of cooperation between Spain and France, and delegations of Spanish and French engineers visited Canfranc to consider the viability of what was clearly a Herculean engineering project. Annual snowfall was so heavy at Canfranc that until 1876 the local population was charged with clearing the single road between Spain and the Aspe Valley to keep it open. The extension of a railway line into the Pyrenees also required a civil engineering effort on a massive scale and an enormous financial investment from both countries.
In 1908 work finally began at both sides of the tunnel. As a result, a village previously known for smuggling and the sale of skins and wool was invaded by an army of workers who began to blast and dig the tunnel and also to construct the infrastructure required to support it. The construction was delayed by World War I, and the station was not formally opened until 1928. For both countries, this was an astonishing feat. In addition to the tunnel itself, and an unusually large station building designed to allow passengers to transfer to the narrower-gauge railway lines on the Spanish side, thousands of workers toiled for two decades constructing dozens of bridges, viaducts, dykes, and smaller tunnels on both sides of the mountains. These infrastructural works also extended to the landscape itself. As early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, extant contemporary documents in Aragon and Béarn described the devastation wrought in both regions by floods, avalanches, and snowfalls. In the winter of 1915 some 35,315 cubic feet (1,000 cubic meters) of snow fell across the Aragon River and the main road running through Canfranc, covering the area where the station was being built. To eliminate these risks, engineers on both sides of the frontier rerouted various rivers, excavated canals, built walls and dykes, and planted forests to act as natural barriers against avalanches. In Aragon alone, Spanish engineers planted more than 8 million trees.
In 1928 the Voz de Aragón hailed the transformation of the “savage well” of the Aragon River into a sedate canal. On July 18 that year the new station was inaugurated in the presence of King Alfonso XIII of Spain, the Spanish dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, the French president Gaston Doumergue, and the Bearnese politician Louis Barthou, who had been instrumental in driving the project forward. The ceremonies were also attended by thousands of soldiers, Civil Guards, and carabineers, anxious at the possibility of an anarchist uprising. Security precautions were so strict that the meals available at the station hotel were mostly uneaten, because only people known to the authorities were actually allowed into Canfranc that day.
The latest “disappearance of the Pyrenees” was hailed in the Spanish and French press, which predicted the regular transport of freight and passengers under the Pyrenees that would make the railway profitable and bring prosperity to both countries. These expectations never materialized. Most freight transport across the Pyrenees continued to move back and forth across the easier road crossings at either end of the range, or via the easier railway crossing at Irun, and the beginning of the Great Depression dealt another blow to Canfranc’s economic viability. Within a few years, the trains passing through Canfranc were mostly empty. Following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Canfranc was seized by the Nationalists and the tunnel was shut down.
At the end of the war it was reopened once again and became one of the escape routes for refugees trying to reach Lisbon from Nazi-occupied France. Following the extension of the occupation to southern France in 1942, Canfranc was used by the Nazis to transport wolfram, aluminum, and other materials for the German war machine provided by the Franco regime northward, in exchange for gold, stolen art treasures—and gold teeth and watches from concentration camp victims—which were carried into Spain. In 1944 a devastating fire burned much of Canfranc to the ground and the station was closed once again. In 1946 it was reopened, and it remained operational until 1970, when a derailment on the French side destroyed one of its bridges.
By this time the railway was so rarely used that the French did not bother to repair the bridge. Despite periodic calls to reopen the line, Canfranc has remained closed ever since, and the opening of the 11-mile (18-kilometer) Somport road tunnel in 2003 has made the railway something of an anachronism, except for the two daily passenger trains between Canfranc and Zaragoza. Today the station provides access to the Canfranc Underground Laboratory, built underneath the Somport tunnel with cofunding by the Spanish government and the University of Zaragoza to conduct experiments into dark matter. The station building itself remains closed, a crumbling and incongruous outpost of urban elegance surrounded by rusted railway lines and buses, still waiting for the rehabilitation that has often been discussed but is yet to implemented.
In the summer of 2013 the government of Aragon opened the station to guided visits in an attempt to highlight the building’s cultural value and prevent it from further disintegration. As is often the case in the Pyrenees, Canfranc’s past has become its central attraction. Each year, on July 18, thousands of Spaniards take part in a reconstruction of the opening of the railway, some of whom are dressed in historical costume to play the role of Alfonso XIII and other dignitaries. In October 2017 the regional government of Aragon announced plans to reopen both the hotel and the tunnel itself, with co-financing from the Spanish government and the European Union. For the time being however, the railway into France remains unused and the station continues to molder, as it has done for more than half a century, a poignant and somewhat forlorn monument to one of the great follies of Pyrenean history—and a concept of “progress” that tends to be regarded very differently in the early twenty-first century than it was at the beginning of the twentieth.5