The Pyrenees

From the foot of the Brèche de Roland, a hundred metre high and forty-metre-wide tooth-like gateway piercing an otherwise sheer mountain wall, it’s easy to understand why Unesco made this landscape one of only a handful of places on Earth to be declared a World Heritage Site, Biosphere Reserve and a Geopark. Spread out below is the whole diversity of the Pyrenees. To the north, on the French side of the range, you can peer across the steep, ice slicked slopes to the giant mountain bowl of the Cirque de Gavernie, one of Europe’s most impressive glacial cirques. Turning to face the south, and Spain, your gaze will sweep across a sunburnt, rock and ice plateau that leads gently downwards to the huge, serpent like chasm of the Ordesa canyon. Meanwhile, just to the east and rising up over an army of giant peaks, is Mt Perdido (French: Mt Perdu). At 3355 metres it’s not the highest mountain in the Pyrenees (that honour goes to Aneto which sails up to 3404m above sea level), but, thanks to the multiple cirques, gorges and canyons that spin away from it like the legs of a geological spider, it’s certainly the most iconic.

Straddling the border of France and Spain and stretching around 430km from the storm tossed Atlantic to the shimmering Mediterranean, the Pyrenees, which is Basque-speaking in the west and Catalan in the east, are not just scenically superb but they’re also a climatic, biological and cultural dividing line. While the north and west of the Pyrenees are green, densely forested and often shrouded in waves of mist and drizzle, the east and south spend much of the year basking in warm sunshine and are covered in aromatic Mediterranean brush. This diversity means that almost every valley can seem to be a world unto itself with wildlife, weather, people, scenery, stories and traditions that can be totally different to the next valley across. In fact, in our opinion there’s simply no more beautiful a mountain range in Europe. Come with us to find out the secrets of the Pyrenees.