The Pyrenees

by Hilaire Belloc

The typical Spanish valley differs, in the centre of the Chain at least, from the typical French valley. With the exception of Andorra (which reminds one in all features of the French side; for it has the same enclosed plain, the same steps and rocky gorges between, the same Jasses, and the same arrangement of towns and villages) the greater part of the valleys, whether Catalan or Aragonese, are not only broader and their streams larger than on the French side, but their arrangement also is different, most of them lack wide pasturages, nearly all of them lack enclosed plains, and there has been no motive to penetrate them since the building of the new roads, for travel upon this road is rare. The Spanish valley, therefore, often many days’ walking in length, never direct, and forming a sort of little province to itself, will have towns and villages scattered in it, haphazard and thinly. Very often a considerable town will be found at the very end of the valley, as Esterri in that of the Noguera Pallaresa, or Venasque in that of the Esera. The lateral communications from one Spanish valley to the next are usually more difficult than those between the French valleys; for many months they are impossible, and there is no such general arrangement of towns on the plain holding the approaches to the valleys as in France, for the reason that the whole plan of the mountains on the Spanish side is far more troubled and irregular.

Thus the first town of the Aragon is Jaca; but Jaca is right in the mountains, and nothing at the outlet of the hills 50 or 60 miles down the valley makes a head town for Jaca. Jaca is a bishopric on its own. On the Gallego there is nothing but a succession of villages of which Sallent right up at the head of the valley is among the largest: it is almost a little town and so is Biescas close by. The Cinca and the Esera have indeed a town upon the plains at Barbastro, but the Noguera Ribagorzana has none, nor has its sister the Noguera Pallaresa, while the Segre has its bishopric and chief town right up in the highest hills at Urgel, and there is nothing to compare with that town until you get to Balaguer.

The southern side of the watershed differs greatly in general structure from the northern, and must be separately recorded.

There are indeed certain accidental similarities. The enclosed valley of Andorra to the south recalls the enclosed valley of Bédous or Accous to the north, and the very high first miles of the torrents, just under the main range, do not differ much whether they are found on the north or on the south side of the mountain. But the general plan and contour of the range presents a great contrast on either side. The main feature of the southern slope is, as I have said, a series of parallel ranges pushing out like ramparts in front of the main heights. If you follow a French valley (on the western part of the Pyrenees at least) you will find it running fairly north and south to the point where it debouches upon the plain some 20, or 25 miles at most, from the watershed.

A Spanish valley will at first appear to have the same character, but just when you think you are in sight of the plains (for instance, just after leaving Canfranc upon the banks of the Upper Aragon) you see—beyond the first lines of flat country, and barring the view like a great wall—another high range: in this case the Sierra de la Peña, the ridge of rock which takes its name from the “Peña-de-Oroel,” a mountain with its eastern end just above Jaca. Beyond this again you have the San Domingo ridge, and to the east of it, another running also east and west, the Sierra de Guara.

Pamplona again is situated at the mouth of a true Pyrenean valley (that of the Arga), not very different from the valleys to the north. It stands also on a plain, but immediately in front of it runs another range of hills, and if you climb these, you find yet another, strictly parallel and straight, standing before you and masking the approach to the Ebro. This formation in parallel outliers continues as far east as the Segre valley, that is for full three-quarters of the length of the Spanish Pyrenees, and in a sense it continues even further east than the river Segre; for the Sierra del Cadi, though it joins on to the main ridge at one point, is essentially an outlier in slope and formation. This parallel formation sometimes comes quite close to the central range, as, for instance, in the Colorado peaks close to Sallent and Panticosa, and the long ridge to the south of Vielsa and El Plan. Indeed the characteristics of Sobrarbe, as this country-side is called, consist in these long parallel ridges.

One result of this formation is, as I have said above, that the river valleys do not run straight, as they do to the north of the range, but are thrust round at right angles when they come up against these ridges. Sometimes they will eat their way through a ridge, as do the two Nogueras, and the Arga itself south of Pamplona; but the greater part of the rivers on the Spanish side suffer the diversion of which I speak, and none more than the river Aragon, which gives its name to the whole central kingdom; for the Aragon, after having run south and straight for a few miles, like any northern river, suddenly turns westward, and runs under the foot to Sierra de la Peña for two days’ march. According to its first direction, it should fall into the Ebro somewhere near Saragossa; as a fact it does not come in until far above Tudela.

Another result of the formation is that the mountain tangle stretches much further on the Spanish side than it does upon the French. If you stand upon the Pass of Salau where the French have made, and the Spanish are making, a high road, you have before you to the north, at a distance of less than 10 miles, the railway and a fairly open valley. Fifteen miles at the most, as the crow flies, you have the main line and the true lowlands at St. Girons. But if you turn and look out in the opposite direction over the valley of Esterri and the higher Noguera Pallaresa, you are looking over 60 miles of mountain land. From the high ridge, which is your standpoint, to the summit of El-Monsech, which is the final rampart of the hills beyond the plains of Lerida, is more than 50 miles, and the slopes of that rampart take you nearly another 10.

A further consequence of this formation is that communications are very difficult to the south of the Pyrenees. The traveller naturally ascribes the lack of communications to the character of Spanish government. It is not wholly due to a moral, but partly to a material cause. The main Spanish railway from Saragossa to Barcelona may be compared to the main French railway from Toulouse to Bayonne, but the Spanish side everywhere suffers from its great wide stretch of wild mountain land. Toulouse itself is little more than 50 miles from the crest of the mountains. Saragossa is half as much again. The Spanish Pyrenees push out civilization, as it were, far from them. Lerida, a large town of the plains, is quite 60 miles from the watershed in a straight line. Pau or Tarbes are less than 30. The difficulty and expense with which the civilization of the plains, and the things belonging to it, must reach the remote upper Spanish valleys largely account for the curiously high degree of their isolation from the world. Many thousands of men are born and die in those high valleys, without ever seeing a wheeled vehicle, and without knowing the gravest news of the outer world for two or three days after the towns have known it.

It is not easy in such a system to establish general divisions. We saw that this was simple enough upon the French side: eight main valleys to the west of the “fault,” and two large sloping ones on the eastern limb. In the Spanish Pyrenees, the nearest thing one can get to a classification is first to group together the Basque valleys of Navarre, the streams of which all flow down to meet at last near Lumbier and fall into the Aragon a few miles further south. Next to take the group of valleys along the mouths of which stands the great Sierra de la Peña, of which the chief is the ravine of the Upper Aragon. These dales, which have at their extremities the huge masses of the Garganta and the Pic d’Anie, form the original stuff of Aragon. These few square miles were the seat from whence that race proceeded which fought its way down to the Ebro, and to the sources of the Tagus, and which can claim the Cid Campeador for its historic type. Next comes the group of valleys beginning with the Gallego and ending with that of Venasque, which forms the eastern limb of Aragon, and has borne for many centuries the title of “Sobrarbe.” Next to consider the two Nogueras as the Western, the Cerdagne and Andorra as the Eastern Catalonian land.