Pyrénées

The Parc national des Pyrénées, created in 1967, is a ribbon: a hundred kilometres of the frontier crest from the Vallée d'Aspe in Béarn to the Néouvielle massif in Bigorre, never much more than fifteen kilometres wide, everything in it facing Spain. Across the border sits Ordesa y Monte Perdido, a national park since 1918, and the two together hold the range's centrepiece as one UNESCO property — Pyrénées–Mont Perdu, the great limestone architecture around the 3,355-metre mountain. On the French side that architecture is delivered as cirques: Gavarnie, whose 1,500-metre tiered wall Victor Hugo called a colosseum and off which the Grande Cascade drops 422 metres; then Estaubé and Troumouse next door, emptier and nearly as vast.

The park's own summit is the Vignemale, 3,298 metres, the highest peak on the French crest, wearing the Ossoue glacier — the French range's largest, and shrinking fast. Count Henry Russell, the Irish-Gascon mystic of Pyrenean mountaineering, leased the whole mountain in 1889 for a franc a year and had seven caves cut into it so he could sleep against the ice in candlelight; the Villa Russell still opens off the glacier route. Wildlife runs to izards — the Pyrenean chamois, back in force after near-extirpation — marmots reintroduced in 1948, the endemic desman hunting invertebrates in torrent beds at night, and the sky heavy with raptors: this range kept Europe's relict bearded vultures, and griffons cross from Aragón on every thermal. In the western valleys, Aspe and Ossau under the tooth of the Pic du Midi d'Ossau, a small brown bear population persists — reinforced, argued over, and mostly invisible. Through all of it runs pastoralism, not as heritage theatre: the estives inside the park are still grazed, and September descents of flocks are village events.

What's worth knowing before you go

Lourdes is the railhead, with buses up to Cauterets and Luz-Saint-Sauveur; Cauterets' Pont d'Espagne, with the Lac de Gaube and the Marcadau valley behind it, is the easiest deep entry into the park. Gavarnie village floods with day visitors in August — go before nine or sleep up at the cirque's hôtellerie. On the Néouvielle side, one of France's oldest nature reserves (1935) scatters seventy granite-bedded lakes under mountain pines growing at some of Europe's highest treelines.

The connoisseur's cirque is Estaubé: no village, no stalls, one path in past the Gloriettes dam, and izards on the moraine at dawn.