Cirque du Soleil
Gavarnie is a spectacular, six-kilometre, semi-circular wall of 3,000-metre peaks, and a superb example of what geologists call a ‘cirque’ – the head of an amphitheatre-like valley formed over millennia by glacial erosion. France’s tallest waterfall, the 423-metre Grande Cascade de Gavarnie, crashes down from the escarpments.
What the Tour de France is missing
One of Flaubert and Hugo’s contemporaries, the historian and naturalist Hippolyte Taine, perhaps best summed up the compulsive allure of Gavarnie, and what the Tour is missing, in his 1867 Voyage aux Pyrénées. ‘… Did you see Gavarnie?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why, then, did you go to the Pyrenees?’ ‘You bow your head and your friend triumphs… You are bombarded with stories and superb similes; you’re charged with laziness, of heaviness of spirit, and as certain English travellers would say, of unaesthetic insensitivity.’ Taine concluded, ‘There are only two solutions: you either learn a description by heart or you make the journey.’ One hundred and fifty years on, the Tour de France would do well to remember: where there’s a will – and a road – there is surely a way.