49 Fun Facts About Pyrenees

The Pyrenees form the border between which two countries?

France and Spain share the crest as their border, with a few quirks: the Val d'Aran lies on the northern, French-facing slope yet belongs to Spain.

The Pyrenees meet the Mediterranean at Cap de Creus, on which Spanish coast?

Costa Brava takes in the last spur of the Pyrenees, Cap de Creus; Salvador Dalí lived beside the cape and put its craggy cliffs into The Persistence of Memory.

What is the highest peak in the Pyrenees?

Aneto saves its scare for the very end: the summit lies beyond the Paso de Mahoma, or Muhammad's Bridge, a short, narrow rock ridge with an exposed drop on either side.

Which microstate lies entirely within the Pyrenees?

Andorra has two heads of state who live elsewhere: the French president and a Catalan bishop, the Bishop of Urgell, reign jointly as its co-princes.

In one Roman legend, the Pyrenees are named for Pyrene, a princess assaulted and later mourned by which hero?

Hercules, in the poet Silius Italicus's telling, buried Pyrene and cried her name until the peaks echoed it; Pliny the Elder dismissed the whole story as fable.

Some ancient writers traced the name Pyrenees to the Greek word for what?

Fire, pyr in Greek: Diodorus Siculus wrote that herdsmen let a blaze consume the whole range, melting its silver ore into streams that Phoenician traders bought for trifles.

Which French département is also known as Northern Catalonia?

Pyrénées-Orientales still speaks Catalan widely, and its capital Perpignan was the mainland seat of the kings of Majorca from 1276 to 1344.

Which persecuted medieval sect made its last great stand at Montségur, a hilltop fortress in the Pyrenean foothills, in 1244?

The Cathars held Montségur through a siege of many months; when it fell in March 1244, more than 200 who refused to renounce their faith were burned together at the foot of its hill.

Compared with the Alps, the Pyrenees are what?

Older: the Pyrenees are an ancient chain pushed up a second time, mostly in the Eocene and Oligocene, before the more recent and vigorous mountain-building that shaped the Alps.

The Pyrenees rose when which body of water 'fanned out', pushing Spain against France?

The Bay of Biscay opened in the Cretaceous as Iberia rotated away from France; the later convergence of the two plates crumpled the sediments between them into the Pyrenees.

What rock gives the Pyrenees their massive, unworn character?

Granite resists erosion: weathering wore away the softer rock above it and left the old granite core standing along the spine of the range.

What is the local name for the mountain torrents that form the Pyrenees' waterfalls?

Gaves is the Gascon word for the torrents of the French Pyrenees; where the two biggest, the Gave de Pau and the Gave d'Oloron, meet, the river is simply named the Gaves réunis, the united Gaves.

What is the highest waterfall in the Pyrenees?

Gavarnie's Grande Cascade drops more than 400 metres down a wall of rock; it is fed by melting snow, so it runs strongest in late spring and early summer.

What is a 'cirque' in Pyrenean landscape terms?

A cliff-ringed valley head, scooped out by a vanished glacier: Troumouse is about four kilometres across, and Victor Hugo called the most famous Pyrenean cirque the Colosseum of nature.

Which pass, the highest paved road in the Pyrenees, climbs above the ski town of Pas de la Casa?

Port d'Envalira, at 2,408 m, has been the highest point of an entire Tour de France; since 2002 a toll tunnel has let drivers skip the summit altogether.

Which pass in Navarre carries the main Camino de Santiago route from France over the Pyrenees?

Roncevaux is the Camino's gateway to Spain: pilgrims climb to it from Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port on the French side, though the pass itself lies wholly inside Spain.

According to legend, which of Charlemagne's paladins sliced a 40-metre-wide gap in the Pyrenean crest with his sword?

Roland, the story goes, was trying to break his sword Durendal so that no enemy could take it; the blade held and the mountain split, leaving the Brèche de Roland.

The Trimouns open pit, high in the Pyrenees near Luzenac, is one of Europe's greatest sources of what?

Talc from Trimouns, quarried at up to 1,800 m, was first carried down by donkey; the pit now yields about 400,000 tonnes a year.

Why do the western Pyrenees receive far more rain and snow than the eastern end?

Moist air off the Atlantic rides in on the prevailing westerlies and sheds its rain on the first slopes it meets, so by the time it reaches the eastern end it is markedly drier.

During the Second World War, the Comet Line smuggled whom over the Pyrenees into neutral Spain?

Downed Allied airmen were hidden in Brussels, taken across France by train and walked over the mountains by local guides; founder Andrée de Jongh led more than a hundred people out herself.

Which small mammal with a trunk-like snout hunts underwater in the mountain streams of the Pyrenees?

The Pyrenean desman, nicknamed the trumpet rat for its snout, is nearly blind and hunts by touch; its only living relative, the Russian desman, lives far away in the Volga basin.

Which Pyrenean animal was cloned after going extinct in 2000?

The ibex of the Pyrenees, the bucardo, ended when a falling tree killed the last female, Celia; her clone died of a lung defect minutes after birth, so the animal has in effect gone extinct twice.

From which country were brown bears brought in the 1990s to revive the Pyrenean population?

Slovenia supplied the bears: three were released from 1996, and one Slovenian male, Pyros, became father, grandfather or great-grandfather of nearly every cub born in the range over the next two decades.

Which vulture of the Pyrenees lives mostly on bones, dropping the big ones from a height onto rocks to crack them open?

The bearded vulture gets up to 90 per cent of its diet from bone, and its old name, ossifrage, means bone-breaker; young birds need years of practice to master the drop.

Which Spanish national park in the Pyrenees dates from 1918, making it among Spain's oldest?

Ordesa y Monte Perdido has been a national park since 1918; its peak is the Lost Mountain, a name said to come from the French side, where the summit hides behind a wall of other peaks.

UNESCO lists the Pyrenees' Mont Perdu massif partly as a rare survival of which traditional farming system?

Transhumance, the seasonal drive of herds up to summer pastures, has been kept up here for centuries; by ancestral agreement, Spanish farmers still graze their animals on the French side.

Which minority language, in its Aranese dialect, is spoken in the Aran Valley?

Occitan, in its Gascon form called Aranese, is official here beside Catalan and Spanish, so road signs read Vielha, not Viella; across the border in France, its heartland, it has no such standing.

Photographs from the Pyrenees' Pic du Midi Observatory in 1909 helped discredit what?

Martian canals, championed by Percival Lowell as the irrigation works of a civilisation, simply failed to show up in the sharp photographs taken from the high, clear summit.

A NASA-backed telescope was installed at Pic du Midi in the Pyrenees in 1963 to photograph what?

The Moon: the one-metre telescope photographed the lunar surface in fine detail in support of the Apollo landings.

What heats the research furnace at Odeillo in the French Pyrenees to thousands of degrees within seconds?

Focused sunlight: 63 mirrors track the sun onto a giant curved mirror, which concentrates the light onto a single small target; its forerunner was built nearby at Mont-Louis in 1949.

Which is the largest urban area close to the Pyrenees?

Toulouse, about 100 km north of the range's foothills, has a metropolitan area of more than 1.3 million people, far bigger than Pamplona, the closest large city on the Spanish side.

Which town at the foot of the Pyrenees became a Catholic pilgrimage site after a girl's 1858 visions?

Lourdes was just a town beneath a medieval castle until 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous reported visions of the Virgin Mary in a nearby grotto; by 1958 the crowds needed a vast underground church.

In the Pyrenees, the GR 10, GR 11 and HRP are what?

Long-distance footpaths along the range, each running from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean: the GR 10 takes some seven weeks on the French side, the GR 11 mirrors it in Spain, and the mostly unmarked HRP weaves across the border.

Which British general fought his way over the Pyrenees into France in 1813?

The Duke of Wellington, still only a marquess at the time, routed the French at Vitoria in June 1813, threw back Marshal Soult's counter-attack through the mountain passes that July and carried the war into France.

Which Catalan-speaking province did Spain cede to France in the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees?

Roussillon had been in French hands since its capital fell in 1642; the treaty of 7 November 1659 made the loss official and set the border on the mountains, leaving Catalan speakers on both sides of it.

Which island, where the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed, do France and Spain govern in turns?

Pheasant Island, an uninhabited islet in the Bidasoa river, was neutral ground for the 1659 talks, and the deal shared it out: Spain holds it from February to July, France from August to January.

The 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees gave France only the 'villages' of northern Cerdanya, so which town stayed a Spanish exclave?

Llívia, the old capital of Cerdanya, ranked as a town, so the clause passed it by; it remains a patch of Spain about 1.6 km inside France, reached by a road that was long kept free of customs.

The 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees made peace between which two monarchs?

Louis XIV and Philip IV sealed it with a wedding: Louis married Philip's daughter Maria Theresa, whose promised dowry was never paid, which gave France its pretext for a new war in 1667.

Which famous cycling climb in the Hautes-Pyrénées tops out at 2,115 m?

Col du Tourmalet joined the Tour de France in 1910; three years later Eugène Christophe broke his fork on it, carried his bike more than ten kilometres to a village forge and, by the rules, had to mend it himself.

Which river rises in the Aran Valley of the Spanish Pyrenees and flows through Bordeaux?

Garonne water starts in Spain, and some of it travels underground: in 1931 the caver Norbert Casteret poured dye into a sinkhole high on the Maladeta massif and saw it surface four kilometres away, above the Aran Valley.

Who ambushed Charlemagne's rearguard as it crossed the Pyrenees in 778?

The Basques wiped out his rearguard after Charlemagne razed Pamplona's walls, reportedly in revenge; three centuries later the epic poem of the battle turned them into a vast Saracen army.

Nearly half a million refugees fled over the Pyrenees into France in early 1939 after which Spanish city fell?

Barcelona fell in January 1939, and with the Spanish Civil War all but lost, soldiers and civilians poured over the passes in midwinter; France penned many of them in barbed-wire camps on the sand at Argelès.

The big white flock-guarding dog known in the US as the Great Pyrenees goes by what nickname in France?

Patou dogs guarded Pyrenean flocks against wolves and bears, and they had a sideline: smugglers loaded them with contraband and sent them over the border by paths no customs man could follow.

According to breed lore, which French king named the Pyrenean Mountain Dog the Royal Dog of France?

Louis XIV's court took up the big white dogs after his young son brought one home from the Pyrenean spa of Barèges; the royal title is part of breed legend, but their vogue among French nobles is well attested.

Which peak, at 3,298 m, is the highest summit of the French Pyrenees?

Vignemale so obsessed the climber Count Henry Russell that he had caves cut into its flanks to live in, threw banquets there and once spent a night buried on the summit.

Which feature, common in the valleys of the Alps, is almost entirely missing from the Pyrenees?

Large lakes like those that fill the side valleys of the Alps are missing; the range is rich instead in hot sulphur springs, prized since Roman times, and in torrents that drop in some of Europe's highest waterfalls.

Which range do the Pyrenees join at their western end?

The Cantabrian Mountains carry the line along Spain's north coast, and no clear break marks the join: geologists count them as the western part of the same mountain belt.

Which French king was born at Pau, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, and first ruled the small mountain kingdom of Navarre?

Henry IV was born in the castle at Pau in 1553, where the turtle shell said to have been his cradle is still kept; he became King of Navarre in 1572 and, in 1589, the first Bourbon king of France.

Which Pyrenean pass carried a Roman road and later the pilgrim route from Arles to Santiago?

Col de Somport carried merchants and pilgrims for centuries; since 2003 an 8.6 km road tunnel has taken the traffic beneath it.