The Future in the Past: The Pyrenees in the Twenty-First Century
Separating the Iberian Peninsula from the rest of the European continent, the snowcapped Pyrenees have always been a special realm, a source of legend and superstition. To explore the Pyrenees fully—the flora and fauna, the local cuisine, the remote glacial lakes and streams, the Romanesque art in a thousand hermitages—could take a lifetime.
—Fodor’s Travel, The Pyrenees Travel Guide, Fodors.com
In 1974 the author Robert Laxalt visited the Pyrenees to write a piece for National Geographic.1 Looking down from the French-Spanish frontier toward the Vallée d’Ossau in the company of a local Aragonese shepherd, Laxalt delicately described a classic Pyrenean panorama that so many nineteenth-century travelers had sought and celebrated, “sprinkled with the golden buttercups of June and gashed along its flank by a torrent of frothing water. Peaks jagged as primitive spearpoints surrounded us, and a profusion of waterfalls dropped in white plumes to the valley floor.” Laxalt also described a landscape that had been transformed by “painted new chalets and resort hotels. These stood on the outskirts of medieval hamlets with gray stone houses, guarded by the turrets of fortified churches. Ski lifts soared to the high peaks. Gigantic water pipes, two abreast, plummeted down the hillsides to a hydroelectric station. Once-secluded meadows bloomed with the blue and yellow and red tents of campers.” Laxalt’s shepherd companion openly lamented these unwelcome intrustions of modernity and described them as a manifestation of the “progress” that had once forced his two sons to abandon the Pyrenees and go “to the big cities for money.”
Laxalt’s meditation on the “enduring Pyrenees” was a more measured reflection on the ongoing transformation of the Pyrenees and the decline of the traditional life of the mountains that he still saw through the eyes of his emigrant father. Despite his anxieties about the degradation of the landscape, he also recognized the benefits that “progress” had brought to the Pyrenees. In the village of Saint-Lary, a French historian told him how tourism had stemmed the flow of young people to the cities and given them new and better-paid jobs beyond farming and agriculture. Such considerations influenced Laxalt’s optimistic conclusion that “progress may alter the face of the Pyrenees, but it will be a long time before it erases the essence of its peoples.”
More than forty years after Laxalt made these observations, “progress” has continued its inexorable advance through the Pyrenees. Today Vielha, the sleepy capital of the once-isolated Val d’Aran, is dominated by featureless high-rise ski buildings. Catalan valleys such as the Vall Fosca and the Vall de Boí have also been expanded by ski chalets and holiday apartments, while parts of the French Pyrenees are dotted with charmless ski villages that look as if they were put up in a weekend. Chairlifts, snowmaking machines, fast-food restaurants, and anonymous hotels add to the sense of intrusion and violation. New roads have accelerated the integration of the Pyrenees into the Anthropocene, bringing traffic, noise, and pollution to valleys that once rang with the cries of birds. Between 1990 and 2000, total traffic back and forth across the Pyrenees rose by 80 percent, and some valleys experienced an increase of 130 percent in the numbers of trucks crossing the mountains. Every day some seventeen thousand heavy trucks cross the passes at Biriatou and Le Perthus alone.
Ecologists in the Spanish and French Pyrenees have attempted at various times to block the expansion of ski resorts, the increase in truck traffic, and the installation of electric pylons and gas pipelines. In France, during the 1990s, the drilling of the Somport road tunnel was fiercely opposed by the communist trade union the Confédération Générale du Travail and also by the more militant “eco-activists” of the Comité pour la Sauvegarde Active de la Vallée d’Aspe (Committee for the Active Safeguard of the Vallée d’Aspe, CSAVA), which warned of the environmental impact of increased truck traffic on the Vallée d’Aspe. Such opposition was not universal. Even though the CSAVA saw the tunnel as the manifestation of a “Europe of business, desperate for new profits,” the “European highway” was supported by many locals on both sides of the mountains, who regarded it in much the same way as a previous generation had regarded Canfranc—as a source of income and an instrument of economic regeneration. In 1994, six thousand people marched in Pau in support of the tunnel, where one speaker told them, “To live on the land, to work on the land, it’s not enough to write some poetry and put a feather in your hat. You need an infrastructure worthy of a new century.”2
These conflicting interests have continued to accompany the march of progress through the Pyrenees. Many visitors may find it difficult to contemplate the legoland ski villages, such as Gourette, near Eaux-Bonnes, or the dismal sight of a deserted ski station in summer, without a sinking feeling. But as Laxalt once observed, whole communities now depend on the tourists who come to them. Outsiders may lament the decline of the “traditional” Pyrenees and the cruder encroachments of modernity, but this transformation has not been entirely negative. In 1809 Joseph Wilson and Robert Andrew described the spa village of Barèges as “perhaps one of the most desolate places in nature” in winter, where the majority of its inhabitants “dare not remain in their houses, but remove furniture and belongings to escape avalanches and rockfalls,” leaving “only a few invalid soldiers to preserve the warm sulphurous springs, which have given such a merited notoriety to the place, from being overwhelmed.”3
One of the main reasons for the persistence of these avalanches, according to the eighteenth-century French engineer Antoine-François Lomets, was the deforestation of their surrounding oak forests by the local population. “Because these slopes, being the first to be freed of snow by the sun and by avalanches, provide the first spring pasture for their sheep, Lomets observed, “the day they take them there, they forget that at home in the winter they have shivered with the fear of being carried away by the avalanches which they have stubbornly provoked.”4 Today the slopes above Barèges are thickly forested as a result of conservation and replanting, and the village that so many visitors once described as a gloomy Pyrenean purgatory for wounded war veterans has become a pleasant and laid-back base for recreational tourism.
Other Pyrenean villages have carried out similar works. For centuries the village of Aas, overlooking the Vallée d’Ossau just above Eaux-Bonnes, suffered regular snowfalls from the treeless hillside. Some houses in the village still have the old “double porch” system, which allowed snow to pass directly through their houses through doors built on two sides. In 1989, however, the local authorities installed snow barriers above the village and began a reforestation program consolidated by regular controlled tree burning to stimulate regrowth, which has succeeded in eliminating avalanches completely.
Even from an environmental perspective, therefore, the impact of modernity on the Pyrenees cannot be reduced to a conflict between “tradition” and “progress.” The reintroduction of bears is an attempt by the French government to restore parts of the Pyrenees to their premodern wild state, yet the “traditional” Pyrenean shepherds have often opposed these efforts. If “progress” has brought roads, pollution, and commercialism to the Pyrenees, it has also brought national parks and conservation areas, which have protected mountains and forests from further unwanted encroachments. Contrary to some assumptions, the environmental degradation of the Pyrenees is not due only to the actions of outsiders. As early as 1683 some French Pyrenean forests and woodlands had become so drastically denuded of their trees that the government ordered every household to plant a tree annually. By 1780 the slopes of the Trône du Roi (King’s Throne) peak in the Vallée d’Aspe had been virtually stripped of pine trees in order to provide masts for the French navy. The Pyrenean pastoral economy also contributed to the destruction, as sheep and goats destroyed young trees and fed on shrubs.
Nineteenth-century visitors to the Pyrenees with much less interest in conservation than our own era were often shocked at the misuse of local resources by the local inhabitants. Richard Ford noted that many Pyrenean woodlands had “suffered much from the neglect, waste and improvidence of the natives, who destroy more than they consume, and rarely replant.”5 In Andorra, James Erskine Murray lamented “the great havoc and haste which the ignorant charbonniers and woodcutters make in cutting down the wood” and the primitive tools which obliged them to cut trees quite high from the ground, leaving “the best and soundest tree left to decay.”6
Perhaps the greatest threat to the ecology of the Pyrenees in the early twenty-first century emanates from far beyond the mountains themselves. In the last hundred years Pyrenean glaciers have declined by 85 percent, and the decline has accelerated during the last few decades. In 1842 Thomas Clifton Paris attempted to climb up through the Brèche de Rolande via Gavarnie through a “smooth glaciar that slopes to the distant circus” on the French side. On contemplating the “huge slope of smooth ice, which went down and down, and grew steeper and steeper” about a quarter of a mile long up toward the Brèche, Paris “could not summon sufficient resolution to attempt the passage” without crampons, and turned back.7
When I passed over the Brèche from the other side in the autumn of 2015, that glacier was an insignificant patch of ice and snow barely fifty yards long. In 2008 Spanish researchers reported a drastic regression of Pyrenean glaciers since 1980 and predicted that all twenty-one remaining Pyrenean glaciers would disappear by 2050. These climatic changes are likely to have a long-term impact on the ecology of the Pyrenees. As the mountains become drier, they are likely to become browner and less forested. The reduction in the level of snow may deprive some of the lowlands of water and may also undermine one of the cornerstones of the Pyrenean tourist economy. In 2010 the European Environment Agency predicted that more than half the ski stations in the Pyrenees “will face difficulties in attracting tourists and winter sports enthusiasts in the future”—a prospect that may well consign some of the ski villages and chalet towns to the same fate as some of their abandoned villages and former spa towns.8
I was often conscious of these possibilities as I walked in the Pyrenees, in record-breaking temperatures that seemed higher every year. In the 1970s film Soylent Green, Edward G. Robinson’s world-weary pensioner Sol checks into a voluntary euthanasia clinic to escape from an overcrowded and nightmarish urbanized world in which nature has largely disappeared or been concreted over. Robinson is put to sleep, serenely watching the photographs of lakes, mountains, and forests from his youth that no longer exist. If I were ever to find myself in a similar situation, I would not need to watch films to be reminded of such things. Images of those Pyrenean walks are permanently embedded in my mind: the dripping beech forest at the top of the Aspe Valley after a summer storm; the steep scree-covered slope below the Col de Petrachema as the bronze wall of rock to our left emerged through the drifting mist; the blue-tinged clarity of a mountain stream as we descended through the Marcadau Valley on a misty late afternoon; the kettle of vultures that cawed at one another above my wife and me as we walked toward Eaux-Bonnes high above a sea of mountains, cliffs, and tumbling forests; the sight of an ibex on the ridge below the summit of Canigou; the breathtaking magnificence of the Gavarnie Cirque; the forest-covered mountains that stretched in every direction during a descent toward Aulus-les-Bains.
Again and again I have found myself in a landscape that was as grandiose, pristine, and emotionally overwhelming as so many travelers have described it. In the course of these walks I often found myself thinking more about the past of the Pyrenees than I did about their future. Today the Pyrenees is a landscape that trades on its past and its history, a landscape crisscrossed with commemorative walking routes and “routes of memory” that have been walked by refugees, pilgrims, travelers, scientists, and soldiers. These walking companions often accompanied me on my own explorations.
I have tried to show the different ways in which the Pyrenees have been imagined and reimagined, and which have, at various times, transformed this random conglomeration of rock, earth, and stone into a place of beauty, terror, and enchantment and a mirror of our best hopes and worst selves. Perhaps now, even in these difficult times, when scientists have suggested that a human settlement on Mars offers some kind of future home for humanity, the Pyrenees can remind us that there is no better planet than the one we have.
In a world where so much seems to be crumbling and falling apart, we might take comfort and consolation from the triumphant words of Jacint Verdaguer engraved on the monument at the summit of Canigou:
What one century builds up, the next brings low
But God’s enduring monument stands strong
Nor raging winds, nor war, nor wrath of men
Will overturn the peaks of Canigó
The soaring Pyrenees will not be bent.