50 Fun Facts About Pyrenees

The Pyrenees form the border between which two countries?

France and Spain share the crest of the Pyrenees as their frontier, a border running from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean along most of the range's length.

Roughly how long are the Pyrenees, from their western junction to the Mediterranean?

The Pyrenees stretch roughly 500 km from their Atlantic end near the Basque coast to Cap de Creus, the Mediterranean headland where the range meets the sea.

What is the highest peak in the Pyrenees?

Aneto, on the Maladeta massif in Huesca province, Spain, is the highest peak of the Pyrenees; its summit is reached across the narrow rock ridge nicknamed the Paso de Mahoma.

How high is Aneto, the range's highest summit?

The summit stands at 3,404 m above sea level, the highest point in the Pyrenees; Posets, at 3,375 m, is the range's second-highest peak.

Which microstate lies within the range?

Its capital Andorra la Vella is the largest town inside the range.

In classical legend, the range is named for Pyrene, a princess violated by which hero?

Hercules, drunk as a guest of King Bebryx, violated Pyrene; in Silius Italicus's Punica he later found her remains and made the mountains echo her name.

Other ancient writers derived the name Pyrenees from the Greek word for what?

Fire is pyr in Greek; Diodorus Siculus told of herdsmen whose blaze burned the whole range and gave it its name.

Which French département is also known as Northern Catalonia?

Pyrénées-Orientales, the easternmost of the six French Pyrenean départements, is centred on Perpignan and the historic Roussillon, the area Catalans call Northern Catalonia.

Physiographically, the Pyrenees are a province of which larger mountain division?

The Alpine System, the belt of young fold mountains running across southern Europe toward the Himalayas, is the division in which the Pyrenees form a distinct physiographic province.

Compared with the Alps, the Pyrenees are what?

Older than the Alps, the Pyrenees were built on Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments, and their uplift peaked in the Eocene while the Alps kept rising through the Miocene.

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 eastern Pyrenees their massive, unworn character?

Granite and gneiss make up almost the whole of the eastern Pyrenees and resist erosion, whereas in the west the granite peaks are flanked by layers of limestone.

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

Gaves is the Gascon name for the mountain torrents of the French Pyrenees, such as the Gave de Pau and the Gave d'Oloron, which meet near Peyrehorade.

What is the highest waterfall in the Pyrenees?

Gavarnie's Grande Cascade plunges more than 400 metres at the head of the Gave de Pau, inside the cirque of the same name, and is usually called the highest waterfall in France.

What is a 'cirque' in Pyrenean landscape terms?

A semicircle of precipitous cliffs at a valley head, carved by a former glacier, is a cirque; the Cirque de Troumouse, roughly four kilometres across, is among the largest.

What is the highest road pass in the Pyrenees, on the road up to the microstate?

Port d'Envalira, at 2,408 m on the main road from France into the microstate, is the highest paved pass in the Pyrenees and among the highest points on Europe's road network.

Which crossing in Navarre, at 1,057 m, is an important point on the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route?

At 1,057 m it is one of the lower crossings.

According to legend, which of Charlemagne's paladins cut the famous gap in the main ridge, La Brèche, with his sword?

La Brèche de Roland is said to have been struck by his sword Durendal.

The Trimouns open pit near Luzenac in Ariège is one of Europe's greatest sources of what?

Talc is dug at Trimouns, the world's largest talc quarry, perched at about 1,800 m above Luzenac and worked only in the snow-free months.

Why do the western Pyrenees receive far more precipitation than the eastern?

Moist Atlantic air from the Bay of Biscay arrives on the prevailing westerlies and drops most of its rain on the western slopes, leaving the eastern end markedly drier.

Roughly where does the annual snow-line lie in the Pyrenees?

The permanent snow-line lies at about 2,700 to 2,800 m; below it, seasonal snow covers the ground at least half the time above 1,600 m from December to April.

Which small semi-aquatic mammal is native to the mountain streams of the Pyrenees?

The Pyrenean desman, a mole-like insectivore with a snorkel-like snout, hunts in fast mountain streams; its only living relative, the Russian desman, lives in the Volga and Don basins.

The Pyrenean ibex, an endemic subspecies, became extinct in which year?

The last Pyrenean ibex, a female named Celia, was found dead in January 2000; a 2003 cloning attempt produced a kid that lived only minutes.

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

Slovenia supplied the bears: females Ziva and Mellba were released near Melles in 1996 and the male Pyros followed in 1997, the founders of the revived population.

The genus most abundantly represented in the range's flora, with several endemic species, is which?

Saxifrages are the most numerous genus in the Pyrenean flora, with several endemic species, among them the long-leaved Saxifraga longifolia of limestone cliffs.

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

Ordesa y Monte Perdido, a national park since 1918, is centred on the 3,355 m limestone peak whose name means Lost Mountain; UNESCO listed the massif as World Heritage in 1997.

The 1997 UNESCO listing cited the landforms and testimony to which traditional agricultural system?

Transhumance, the seasonal movement of livestock, shaped the landscape: whole families once moved uphill with their herds in May or June and back down in autumn.

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

Occitan, in its Gascon variety called Aranese, is the Aran Valley's native tongue and has been co-official in Catalonia alongside Catalan and Spanish since 2006.

The Pic du Midi Observatory sits at what altitude?

The Pic du Midi Observatory stands at 2,877 m on the Pic du Midi de Bigorre, reached by cable car from the ski resort of La Mongie; construction of the observatory began in 1878.

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

The Moon, ahead of the Apollo missions, was the target: a NASA-funded 106 cm telescope installed in 1963 produced detailed lunar surface photographs for landing-site studies.

What temperature can the world's largest solar furnace, at Odeillo in the Pyrenees, reach within seconds?

Above 3,500 °C is reached in seconds at the focal point, where 63 heliostats bounce sunlight onto a 54 m parabolic mirror that concentrates it about 10,000 times.

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 pilgrimage town in the Hautes-Pyrénées is among the main towns inside the range?

Lourdes, on the Gave de Pau in the Hautes-Pyrénées, draws millions of Catholic pilgrims a year to the grotto where Bernadette Soubirous reported Marian apparitions in 1858.

The GR 10, GR 11 and HRP are what?

Long-distance footpaths along the range: the GR 10 crosses the French side, the GR 11 the Spanish side, and the Haute Randonnée Pyrénéenne keeps to the high ridges between them.

Pirena is a competition held in the Pyrenees in what sport?

Dog mushing was Pirena's sport: a sled-dog stage race of roughly 1,000 km across the Pyrenees, run each winter for about two decades from 1991.

The Treaty of the Pyrenees, fixing the Franco-Spanish border, was signed in which year?

Signed on 7 November 1659, the Treaty of the Pyrenees ended the Franco-Spanish War that had begun in 1635 and gave France Roussillon and Artois.

The Treaty of the Pyrenees was negotiated on which condominium in the Bidasoa River?

Pheasant Island, a tiny islet in the Bidasoa between Hendaye and Irun, was the treaty's neutral meeting ground and has since been a condominium administered by each country for six months in turn.

Because the treaty said only 'villages' north of the mountains would go to France, which town became a Spanish exclave inside France?

Llívia, once the capital of Cerdanya, held the status of a town rather than a village, so it stayed Spanish and is linked to Puigcerdà by a neutral road.

Which two monarchs signed the Treaty of the Pyrenees?

Louis XIV and Philip IV were the signatories; their chief ministers, Cardinal Mazarin and Luis de Haro, negotiated it, and Louis then married Philip's daughter Maria Theresa.

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

Col du Tourmalet, at 2,115 m between Sainte-Marie-de-Campan and Luz-Saint-Sauveur, is the climb the Tour de France has crossed more often than any other, first in 1910.

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

The Garonne rises in the Aran Valley on the Spanish side and flows north then west for about 600 km, joining the Dordogne below Bordeaux to form the Gironde estuary.

Who ambushed Charlemagne's rearguard in the mountains in 778?

The Basques attacked as Charlemagne withdrew from Spain, reportedly to avenge his razing of Pamplona's walls; Einhard's Life of Charlemagne names the attackers as Wascones.

The 778 ambush of Charlemagne's rearguard is recounted in which 11th-century work, the oldest surviving major work of French literature?

The Song of Roland, the oldest surviving chanson de geste, recasts the ambush as a battle with Saracens and has Roland die blowing his horn to summon Charlemagne.

The livestock-guarding dog breed known in the US as the Great Pyrenees is called what in France?

Patou, the everyday French name for the Pyrenean Mountain Dog, comes from pâtre, an old word for shepherd; the breed has guarded flocks against wolves and bears in the high pastures for centuries.

Which French king designated the Pyrenean Mountain Dog the Royal Dog of France?

Louis XIV's court adopted the breed as the Royal Dog of France in 1675 after the young Dauphin and Madame de Maintenon brought one back from the Pyrenees, making it fashionable.

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

Vignemale, 3,298 m on the border above Cauterets, is the highest summit on the French side and carries the Ossoue glacier, the largest on the French slopes.

The Pyrenees are noted for the near absence of what feature common in the Alps?

Great lakes in the lateral valleys, so typical of the Alps, are almost absent from the Pyrenees, which are also short of low passes, so main roads run at the two ends near sea level.

Which mountain range do the Pyrenees join at their western end?

The Cantabrian Mountains continue the chain westward along Spain's north coast; the Pyrenees proper end near the Basque country before running east to Cap de Creus.

Why do the eastern Pyrenees lack glaciers?

Snowfall is insufficient in the drier eastern Pyrenees to feed glaciers; those that survive cling to the northern slopes of the central range, lying along the chain rather than descending into valleys.

Which mountain crossing, at 1,632 m, carried old Roman roads and is also called the Port de Canfranc?

Col de Somport, the Roman Summus Portus at 1,632 m, carried a Roman road and later the Camino Aragonés; a road tunnel opened beneath it in 2003.