"It's the Colosseum of nature; it's Gavarnie."

Often, quotes from this magnificent poem by Victor Hugo are reduced to a few words, at best a single line... Here it is, in full - to be read aloud at the foot of the giant... 

In the summer of 1843, during his “Voyage aux Pyrénées”, Victor Hugo discovered the Cirque de Gavarnie.

A site that will mark him forever, as it will mark many Pyrenean enthusiasts, such as Franz Schrader who signed this engraving.

Twelve years later, he evokes the memory of Gavarnie in the long poem “Dieu”, thus completing the triptych begun with the Legend of the Centuries.

In his writing, the circus becomes a gigantic amphitheater, a cosmic battlefield where the voice of the Creation of the World can be heard.

GAVARNIE

When you have passed the Dourroucats bridge and are only a quarter of an hour from Gèdre, two mountains suddenly move apart and, however concerned you may be about approaching Gavarnie, reveal something unexpected. 

Perhaps you have visited the Alps, the Andes, the Cordilleras; for the past few weeks you have had the Pyrenees before your eyes; whatever you may have seen, what you are seeing now is unlike anything you have encountered elsewhere. Up to now you have seen mountains; you have contemplated outcrops of all shapes and heights; you have explored green ridges, slopes of gneiss, marble or schist, precipices, rounded or jagged peaks, glaciers, fir forests mingled with clouds, granite spires, ice needles; but, I repeat, you have seen nowhere what you see at this moment on the horizon. 

In the midst of the capricious curves of the mountains bristling with obtuse and acute angles, suddenly appear straight, simple, calm lines, horizontal or vertical, parallel or intersecting at right angles, and combined in such a way that from their whole results the brilliant, real figure, penetrated by azure and sun, of an impossible and extraordinary object. 

Is it a mountain? But what mountain has ever presented such rectilinear surfaces, such regular planes, such rigorous parallelisms, such strange symmetries, such a geometric aspect? Is it a wall? Here are towers indeed, buttressing and supporting it, here are battlements, here are the cornices, the architraves, the courses and the stones that the eye can distinguish and almost count, here are two breaches hewn to the quick, which awaken in the mind ideas of sieges, trenches and assaults; but here are also snows, broad bands of snow laid upon these courses, upon these battlements, upon these architraves and upon these towers; we are in the heart of summer and midday; these are therefore eternal snows; now, what wall, what human architecture has ever risen to the terrifying level of eternal snows? Babel, the effort of the entire human race, collapsed upon itself before it had reached its goal. 

What is this inexplicable object that cannot be a mountain and yet has the height of mountains, that cannot be a wall and yet has the shape of walls? 

It is a mountain and a wall all at once; it is the most mysterious edifice of the most mysterious of architects; it is the colosseum of nature; it is Gavarnie. 

Picture this magnificent silhouette as it first appears from a distance of three leagues: a long, dark wall, every projection and crease marked by lines of snow, every platform covered in glaciers. Near the middle, two large towers; one to the east, square and turning one of its corners towards France; the other to the west, fluted as if it were less a tower than a cluster of turrets; both covered in snow. To the right, two deep clefts, the breaches, cut into the wall like two vases filled by clouds; finally, still to the right and at the westernmost point, a kind of enormous rim, pleated with a thousand tiers, which presents to the eye, in monstrous proportions, what in architecture would be called the cross-section of an amphitheater. 

Picture it as I saw it: the black wall, the black towers; the brilliant snow, the blue sky; a complete thing at last, grand to the point of being unheard of, serene to the point of being sublime. 

This is an impression unlike any other, so singular and so powerful that it erases everything else, and for a few moments, even when this magical vision has disappeared around a bend in the road, one becomes indifferent to everything that is not it. 

The surrounding landscape is nonetheless magnificent; you enter a valley where all magnificence and grace envelop you. Two-tiered villages, like Tracy-le-Haut and Tracy-le-Bas, Gèdre-Dessus and Gèdre-Dessous, with their stepped gables and old Templar church, huddle and unfold on the slopes of two mountains, along a mountain stream white with foam, beneath the cheerful and whimsical tufts of charming vegetation. All this is vibrant, delightful, joyful, exquisite; it is Switzerland and the Black Forest suddenly merging with the Pyrenees. A thousand joyful sounds reach you like the voices and words of this gentle landscape: birdsong, children's laughter, the murmur of the stream, the rustling of leaves, the calming breaths of the wind. 

You see nothing; you hear nothing; you barely perceive any vague and confused impression of this graceful whole. The apparition of Gavarnie is always before your eyes, and radiates in your thoughts like those supernatural horizons one sometimes sees in the depths of dreams. In the evening, returning from Gavarnie, an admirable moment. From my window: a great mountain fills the earth; a great cloud fills the sky. Between the cloud and the mountain, a thin band of twilight sky, clear, vivid, limpid, and Jupiter sparkling, a golden pebble in a silver stream. Nothing could be more melancholy, more reassuring, or more beautiful than this small point of light between these two blocks of darkness.

Victor Hugo, 1855

A colossus sculpted by a glacier 20,000 years ago

"An immense stone chest" that witnessed the Creation of the World ... Victor Hugo was quite right! 20,000 years ago, a glacier flowed from Gavarnie to Lourdes in this very spot. Its enormous mass carved out the valley and sculpted the rock, propelling the ochre and grey limestone to an altitude of over 3,000 meters.

The cirque consists of 16 concentric peaks, at more than 3,000 meters altitude : Pic du Taillon (3144 m), Pic du Casque, Pic de l'Epaule, Pic de la Tour, Pic du Marboré (3248 m), du Gabiétou, des Astazous… up to the sublime Mont Perdu (3355 m).

Only the famous “Roland’s Breach”, with its many legends , breaks this symmetry, offering a passage to Spain – the Cirque de Gavarnie indeed marks the border between the French Pyrenees and Aragon.

Numerous waterfalls tumble down steep walls, the largest of which is the great Gavarnie waterfall, 422 meters high.

In 1997, the Mont Perdu massif, which includes the Cirque de Gavarnie, was classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as both a natural and cultural landscape – this site also marking a long tradition of pastoralism between Aragonese and French villages.

The Cirque de Gavarnie has become the meeting point for Pyreneists - some of whom have the privilege of resting opposite this natural wonder, in the Gavarnie cemetery - illustrating in the best way the inseparable physical experience of the mountains, with the aesthetic and artistic emotion experienced in the Pyrenees.

Come and visit this wonder of nature, rediscover the spirit of the Pyreneists, by staying at Chalet La Source !