Pyrenees

• 1. Introduction

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  The Pyrenees run for nearly 500 kilometres, from the Cantabrian Mountains in the west to Cap de Creus on the Mediterranean coast. Their highest point is Aneto, at 3404 metres, in the Spanish province of Huesca. Along most of the main crest runs the border between France and Spain. Squeezed into the middle sits the tiny state of Andorra. Yet history never respected that line. The Crown of Aragon and the Kingdom of Navarre once reached across the mountains to both sides. Why would a range this long have so few low crossings? Where did its name come from, and why do two ancient authors tell such different tales about it? What lives in these valleys that exists almost nowhere else on Earth? And how did a mountain chain end up hosting a giant telescope and the largest solar furnace in the world?

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• 2. Pyrene's Name

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  Silius Italicus tells of Pyrene, the virgin daughter of Bebryx, a king in Mediterranean Gaul. Bebryx gave shelter to Hercules during his quest for the cattle of Geryon. In this telling, the hero repaid that hospitality by violating his host's daughter. Pyrene bore a serpent and fled into the woods, afraid of her father's anger. Alone, she poured out her story to the trees. Wild beasts heard her and tore her apart.

  Hercules came back after defeating Geryon and found her remains. The poem shows him sober and heartbroken, laying her to rest and ordering the surrounding land to mourn. The mountaintops shuddered, and the cliffs and beast-haunts echoed her name back. In the poet's words, the mountains hold on to the wept-over name through the ages.

  Pliny the Elder knew a version of the tale and linked it to Lusitania. He dismissed it as fabulosa, meaning highly fictional. Herodotus offered something plainer, saying Pyrene was the name of a town in Celtic Europe.

  A second explanation comes from the Greek word for fire, pyr. Diodorus Siculus claimed that herdsmen once left a fire burning in ancient times. It raged day after day, scorched the very surface of the ground, and gave the range its name. Of these origins, the legend of Roland, a hero said to have carved a gap in the ridge, belongs to the landscape itself, and that is where the story turns next.

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• 3. Granite and Limestone

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  Between 100 and 150 million years ago, in the Early Cretaceous, the Bay of Biscay fanned open. That movement pushed what is now Spain against France and squeezed thick layers of sedimentary rock. The pressure lifted the crust first in the east, then along the whole chain, and it peaked in the Eocene. The sediments themselves are older, laid down in coastal basins during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic eras. This is why the Pyrenees are older than the Alps.

  Go back further, to the span from the Ediacaran to the Ordovician, and the Pyrenees sat on the northwest margin of Gondwana. Neighbouring territories such as the Montagne Noire and Mouthoumet massifs, and the southwest of Sardinia, formed a continuous belt with them.

  The rock changes from end to end. The east is mostly granite and gneiss, while in the west granite peaks are flanked by limestone. Granite resists erosion, and glaciers here carved less than elsewhere, so the chain looks massive and unworn. On the high ground, low-relief surfaces form a peneplain that took shape no earlier than the Late Miocene.

  The stone has been put to use for centuries. At Luzenac, in Ariège, the open pit of Trimoun is one of Europe's great sources of talc. Romans opened many of the marble quarries. They took out Grand Antique for Rome and Constantinople, and later quarrying supplied coloured marbles for the Louvre, Versailles and the Royal Palace of Madrid.

  Hot water also rises here. Sulfurous springs such as Les Escaldes in Andorra, Panticosa and Lles in Spain, and Ax-les-Thermes in France emerge high up, near the contact of granite with layered rock. Lower springs, such as Rennes-les-Bains in Aude, are cooler and selenitic.

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• 4. Cliffs and Passes

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  At 1057 metres, the Roncevaux Pass lies entirely within Navarre and serves the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. It is the lowest of the notable crossings, and the others climb far higher. The Col de Somport, at 1632 metres, still follows old Roman roads. Pas de la Casa, also called Port d'Envalira, reaches 2408 metres and is the highest road pass in the range. It carries traffic from France into Andorra.

  Low passes are scarce and the usable ones sit high, so main roads and railways between the two countries run only at the far ends, near sea level. Tunnels now run beneath Somport, Envalira and Puymorens. Newer routes through the centre of the range connect Bielsa and Vielha. No big cities lie inside the mountains, and the two coastal-end roads, the E15 and the E5/E70/E80, both opened in the 1970s.

  The central Pyrenees hold the highest peaks after Aneto: Posets at 3375 metres and Monte Perdido at 3355 metres. Between them and the passes stretch scenic features unlike the Alps. The range has no great lakes of the kind that fill alpine side valleys. Its mountain torrents, called gaves, tumble over lofty waterfalls that only Scandinavia surpasses in Europe.

  At the head of the Gave de Pau, Gavarnie falls 462 metres, the highest waterfall in the range. In the same valley, the Cirque de Gavarnie curves in a semicircle of sheer cliff. Nearby, the cirques of Troumouse and Estaubé are further examples. High on one ridge, La Brèche de Roland marks a gap that legend says Roland himself created.

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• 5. Wet West, Dry East

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  Moist air rolling in from the Atlantic over the Bay of Biscay drops its rain and snow on the western and central Pyrenees. By the time it reaches the east, it is dry. The winter average temperature across the range is -2 degrees Celsius. Above 1600 metres, seasonal snow lies on the ground at least half the time between December and April, and the annual snow line sits between about 2700 and 2800 metres.

  Glaciers cling to the northern slopes of the central Pyrenees, in a narrow zone near the highest crests. They do not slide far down into valleys the way alpine glaciers do. The eastern Pyrenees have none at all, because too little snow falls. Older ice once reached much farther, and the best evidence lies in the valley of Argeles Gazost, between Lourdes and Gavarnie.

  Plants follow the same gradient. The extreme west has wooded lower slopes, and forest thins as one moves east, where granite and a wild, barren feel dominate. Latitude changes by only about one degree. Even so, the western flora resembles that of central Europe, while the eastern flora is distinctly Mediterranean.

  Endemic species are nearly as numerous as in the Alps. Xatardia, a genus with a single species, grows only on one high alpine pass between the Val d'Eynes and Catalonia. Saxifrages are the most abundant genus in the range, and several of their species occur nowhere else.

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• 6. Rare Animals

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  The Pyrenean desman lives only in certain streams on the northern slopes. Only one other desman exists, the Russian desman, confined to the Volga basin in southern Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine. High-altitude streams and lakes shelter the Pyrenean brook salamander, an amphibian found nowhere else. In the caverns of Ariège live blind insects, notably of the genera Anophthalmus and Adelops.

  In January 2000, the Pyrenean ibex became extinct. This endemic subspecies of the Iberian ibex had no successor of its own kind. A different subspecies, the western Spanish ibex, was brought into the area, and by 2020 it numbered over 400 individuals.

  Brown bears faced a similar collapse after hunting reduced the native population to near-extinction in the 1990s. In 1996, three bears were brought in from Slovenia. They bred successfully, and about 15 brown bears are now believed to live in the central region around Fos. Only four native bears remain in the Aspe Valley.

  Several reserves protect what survives, including Ordesa y Monte Perdido and Aigüestortes i Estany de Sant Maurici in Spain, and the Pyrénées National Park in France. In 1997, UNESCO placed part of the range on the World Heritage List for its spectacular landforms and for a farming tradition that shaped the pastures.

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• 7. Summer Pastures

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  Each May or June, farm families in the Pyrenean valleys once drove their cows and sheep uphill. That was only half of the migration. Historically, most members of the household went too, taking pigs, horses and chickens along. They stayed in basic stone cabins high in the mountains. Return to the farms came in September or October. This practice, called transhumance, let communities keep larger herds than the lowland farms could carry.

  Industrialisation and changing farming methods have diminished the custom. Popular festivals still celebrate it, and UNESCO cited it when it listed part of the range.

  The people of these valleys speak many tongues. Spanish and French dominate, alongside Aragonese, Catalan and Basque. Catalan is spoken in Andorra and in both Northern and Southern Catalonia. Occitan is heard to a lesser degree, in its Gascon and Languedocien dialects in France and the Aranese dialect in the Aran Valley.

  Toulouse, with a metropolitan population of 1,330,954, is the largest urban area near the range. On the Spanish side, Pamplona is closest, at 319,208. Inside the mountains, Andorra la Vella is the main town at 22,256 people, followed by Escaldes-Engordany with 14,367 and Lourdes with 13,976.

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• 8. Telescopes and Tours

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  On top of Pic du Midi de Bigorre, at 2877 metres, construction of an observatory began in 1878. Its 8-metre dome was finished in 1908. A year later, its powerful equatorial reflector was used to formally discredit the Martian canal theory. In 1963, a 1.06-metre telescope funded by NASA arrived and took detailed photographs of the Moon in preparation for the Apollo missions. Studies in 1965 analysed the atmospheres of Mars and Venus, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists used them to predict that neither planet had life. A 2-metre telescope installed in 1980 remains the largest in France, and today the site is open to amateur astronomers.

  At Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via, in Pyrénées-Orientales, stands the world's largest solar furnace, built between 1962 and 1968. It uses 63 heliostats. The site was chosen for more than 2,500 hours of direct sunshine a year and for clear, low-humidity air. Temperatures above 3500 degrees Celsius can be reached in seconds, allowing researchers to study how materials cope with extreme heat and sudden thermal shock.

  The mountains also host sport. Skiers and mountaineers use both flanks in winter, and resorts such as Baqueira-Beret, Formigal and Soldeu fill the slopes. In summer, athletes train at altitude by cycling and running. The Tour de France in July and the Vuelta a España in September both often feature Pyrenean stages that decide the race and draw hundreds of thousands of spectators. Walkers can follow the GR 10 along the north, the GR 11 along the south, or the high-level HRP across the ridges. Dog-mushers gather for a competition called Pirena.

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