Castles and Chateaux of Old Navarre and the Basque Provinces

CHAPTER XX
TARBES, BIGORRE AND LUCHON

THERE is a clean-cut, commercial-looking air to Tarbes, little in keeping with what one imagines the capital of the Hautes-Pyrénées to be. Local colour has mostly succumbed to twentieth-century innovations in the train of great hotels, tourists and clubs. In spite of this, the surrounding panorama is superb; the setting of Tarbes is delightful; and at times – but not for long at a time – it is really a charming town of the Midi. Tarbes possessed a château of rank long years ago; not of so high a rank as that of Pau, for that was royal, but still a grand and dignified château, worthy of the seigneurs who inhabited it. Raymond I fortified the place in the tenth century, and all through the following five hundred years life here was carried on with a certain courtly splendour. To-day the château, or what is left of it, serves as a prison.

The unlovely cathedral at Tarbes was once a citadel, or at least served as such. It must have been more successful as a warlike accessory than as a religious shrine, for it is about the most ungracious, unchurchly thing to be seen in the entire round of the Pyrenees.

The chief architectural curiosity of Tarbes is the Lycée, on whose portal (dated 1669) one reads: “May this building endure until the ant has drunk the waters of the ocean, and the tortoise made the tour of the globe.” It seems a good enough dedication for any building.

The ever useful Froissart furnishes a reference to Tarbes and its inns which is most apropos. Travellers even in those days, unless they were noble courtiers, repaired to an inn as now.

The Messire Espaing de Lyon, and the Maître Jehan Froissart made many journeys together. It was here under the shelter of the Pyrenees that the maître said to his companion:

“Et nous vînmes à Tarbes, et nous fûmes tout aises à l’hostel de l’Etoile… C’est une ville trop bien aisée pour séjourner chevaux: de bons foins, de bons avoines et de belles rivières.”

Tarbes is something of an approach to this, but not altogether. The missing link is the Hostel de l’Étoile, and apparently nothing exists which takes the place of it. From the fourteenth century to the twentieth century is a long time to wait for hotel improvements, particularly if they have not yet arrived.

The great Marché de Tarbes is, and has been for ages, one of its chief sights, indeed it is the rather commonplace modern city’s principal picturesque accessory, if one excepts its grandly scenic background. Every fifteen days throughout the year the market draws throngs of buyers and sellers from the whole region of the western Pyrenees.

In the very midst of the most populous and wealthy valleys and plains of the Pyrenees, one sees here the complete gamut of picturesque peoples and costumes in which the country abounds. Here are the Béarnais, agile and gay, and possessed of the very spirit associated with Henri IV. They seat themselves among their wares, composed of woollen stuffs and threads, pickled meats, truffles, potatoes, cheeses of all sorts, agricultural implements – mostly primitive, but with here and there a gaudy South Bend or Milwaukee plough – porcelain, coppers, cattle, goats, sheep and donkeys, and a greater variety of things than one’s imagination can suggest. It is almost the liveliest and most populous market to be seen in France to-day. The gaudy umbrellas and tents cover the square like great mushrooms. There are much picturesqueness and colour, and lively comings and goings too. This is ever a contradiction to the reproach of laziness usually applied to the care-free folk of the Midi.

In olden times the market of Tarbes was the resort of many Spanish merchants, and they still may be distinguished as donkey-dealers and mule traders, but the chief occupants of the stalls and little squares of ground are the dwellers of the countryside, who think nothing of coming in and out a matter of four or five leagues to trade a side of bacon – which they call simply salé– for a sheep or a goat, or a sheep or a goat for a nickel clock, made in Connecticut. It’s as hard for the peasant to draw the line between necessities and superfluities as it is for the rest of us, and he is often apt to put caprice before need.

Neighbouring close upon Tarbes is the ancient feudal bourg of Ossun, which most of the fox-hunters of Pau, or the pilgrims of Lourdes, know not even by name. It’s only the traveller by road – the omnipresent automobilist of to-day – who really stands a chance of “discovering” anything. The art of travel degenerated sadly with the advent of the railway and the “personally conducted pilgrimage,” but the automobile is bringing it all back again. The bicycle stood a chance of participating in the same honour at one time, but folk weren’t really willing to take the trouble of becoming a vagabond on wheels.

Ossun was the site of a Roman camp before it became a feudal stronghold, and with the coming of the château and its seigneurs, in the fifteenth century, it came to a prominence and distinction which made of it nearly a metropolis. To-day it is a dull little town of less than two thousand souls, but with a most excellent hotel, the Galbar, which is far and away better (to some of us) than the popular hotels of Pau, Tarbes or Luchon.

The château of Ossun, or so much of it as remains, was practically a fortress. What it lacks in luxury it makes up for in its intimation of strength and power, and from this it is not difficult to estimate its feudal importance.

The Roman camp, whose outlines are readily defined, was built, so history tells, by one Crassus, a lieutenant of Cæsar. It was an extensive and magnificent work, a long, sunken, oblong pit with four entrances passing through the sloping dirt walls. Four or five thousand men, practically a Roman legion, could be quartered within.

It was from the Château d’Odos, near Tarbes, in the month of December, 1549, that the Queen of Navarre observed the comet which was said to have made its appearance because of the death of Pope Paul III. Says Brantome: “She jumped from her bed in fright at observing this celestial phenomenon, and presumably lingered too long in the chill night, for she caught a congestion which brought about her death eight days later, 21st December, 1549, in the fifty-eighth year of her age.” According to Hilarion de Coste her remains were transported to Pau, and interred in the “principal église,” but others, to the contrary, say that she was buried in the great burial vault at Lescar. This is more likely, for an authentic document in the Bibliothèque Nationale describes minutely the details of the ceremony of burial “dans l’antique cathédrale de Lescar.”

On the Landes des Maures, near by, was celebrated a bloody battle in the eighth century between the Saracens and the inhabitants of the country. Gruesome finds of “skulls of extraordinary thickness” have frequently been made on this battlefield. Just what this description seems to augur the writer does not know; perhaps some ethnologist who reads these lines will. At any rate the combatants must have died hard.

Following up the valley of the Adour one comes to the Bagnères de Bigorre in a matter of twenty-five kilometres or so. Bagnères de Bigorre is a hodge-podge of a name, but it is the “Bath” of France, as an Englishman of a century ago called it. There are other resorts more popular and fashionable and more wickedly immoral, such as Vichy, Aix les Bains and even Luchon, but still Bigorre remains the first choice. From the times of the Romans, throngs have been coming to this charming little spot of the Pyrenees where the mineral waters bubble up out of the rock, bringing health and strength to those ill in mind and body. Pleasure seekers are here, too, but primarily it is the baths which attract.

There are practically no monuments of bygone days here, but fragmentary relics of one sort or another tell the story of the waters from Roman times to the present with scarcely a break.

Arreau, seven leagues from Bigorre, towards the heart of the Pyrenees, through the Val d’Arreau, certainly one of the most picturesquely unspoiled places in all the Pyrenees, is a relic of mediævalism such as will hardly be found elsewhere in the whole chain of mountains from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Its feudal history was fairly important, but its monuments of the period, save its churches and its market house or “Halle,” have practically disappeared. Whatever defences there may have been, have been built into the town’s fine stone houses and bridges, but the Roman tower of St. Exupère, and the primitive church now covered by Notre Dame show its architectural importance in the past.

By reason of being one of the gateways through the Pyrenees into Spain (by the valley of the Arreau and the portes, so called, of Plan and Vielsa) Arreau enjoys a Franco-Espagnol manner of living which is quaint beyond words. It is the nearest thing to Andorra itself to be found on French soil.

Luchon is situated in a nook of the Larboust surrounded with a rural beauty only lent by a river valley and a mountain background. The range to the north is bare and grim, but to the southward is thickly wooded, with little eagles’-nest villages perched here and there on its flanks and peaks, in a manner which leads one to believe that this part of the Pyrenees is as thickly peopled as Switzerland, where peasants fall out of their terrace gardens only to tumble into those of a neighbour living lower down the mountain-side.

The surroundings of Luchon are indeed sublime, from every point of view, and one’s imagination needs no urging to appreciate the sentiment which is supposed to endow a “nature-poet.” Yes, Luchon is beautiful, but it is overrun with fashionables from all over the world, and is as gay as Biarritz or Nice. “La grande vie mondaine” is the key-note of it all, and if one could find out just when was the off-season it would be delightful. Of late it has been crowded throughout the year, though the height of fashion comes in the spring. Outside of its sulphur springs the great world of fashion comes here to dine and wine their friends and play bridge.

Luchon has a history though. As a bathing or a drinking place it was known to the Romans as Onesiorum Thermæ and was mentioned by Strabo as being famous in those days.

There were many pagan altars and temples here erected to the god Ilixion, which by evolution into Luchon came to be the name by which the place has latterly been known.

In 1036, by marriage, Luchon was transferred from the house of Comminges to that of Aragon, but later was returned to the Comtes de Comminges and finally united with France in 1458 under Charles VII, retaining, however, numerous ancient privileges which endured until the end of the seventeenth century.

This was the early history of Luchon. Its later history began when, in 1754, the local waters were specially analyzed and a boom given to a project to make of the place a great spa.

The city itself is the proprietor of all the springs and its administrative sagacity has been such that fifty thousand visitors are attracted here within the year.

CHAPTER XXI
BY THE BLUE GAVE DE PAU

THE Gave de Pau, a swiftly-flowing stream which comes down from its icy cradle in the Cirque de Gavarnie and joins with the Adour near Bayonne’s port, winds its way through a gentle, smiling valley filled with gracious vistas, historic sites and grand mountain backgrounds.

Next to the æsthetic aspects of the Gave de Pau are its washhouses. The writer in years of French travel does not remember to have seen a stream possessed of so many.

One sees similar arrangements for washing clothes all over France, but here they are exceedingly picturesque in their disposition, and the workers therein are not of the Zola-Amazon type, nor of the withered beldam class. How much better they wash than others of their fraternity elsewhere is not to be remarked.

There are municipal washhouses in some of the larger towns of France, great, ugly, brick, cement and iron structures, but as the actual washing is done after the same manner as when carried on by the banks of a rushing river or a purling brook there is not much to be said in their favour that cannot as well be applied to the washhouses of Pau, Oloron or Orthez in Navarre, and artist folk will prefer the latter.

Coarraze, twenty kilometres above Pau, on the banks of the Gave, is a populous centre where the hum of industry, induced by the weavers who make the toile du Béarn, is the prevailing note. Toile du Béarn and chapelets are the chief output of this little bourg, and many francs are in circulation here each Saturday night that would probably be wanting except for these indefatigable workers who had rather bend over greasy machines at something more than a living wage, than dig a mere existence out of the ground.

The little bourg is dull and gray in colour, only its surroundings being brilliant. Its situation is most fortunate. Opposite is a great tree-covered plateau, a veritable terrace, on which is a modern château replacing another which has disappeared – “comme un chevreau en liberté,” says the native.

It was in this old Château de Coarraze that the youthful Henri IV was brought up by an aunt, en paysan, as the simple life was then called. Perhaps it was this early training that gave him his later ruggedness and rude health.

The château has been called royal, and its construction has been attributed to Henri IV, but this is manifestly not so. Only ruined walls and ramparts, and the accredited facts of history, remain to-day to connect Henri IV with the spot.

The château virtually disappeared in a revolutionary fury, and only the outline of its former walls remains here and there. A more modern structure, greatly resembling the château at Pau, practically marks the site of the former establishment endowed with the memory of Henri IV’s boyhood.

Froissart recounts a pleasant history of the Château de Coarraze and its seigneur. A certain Raymond of Béarn had acquired a considerable heritage, which was disputed by a Catalan, who demanded a division. Raymond refused, but the Catalan, to intimidate his adversary, threatened to have him excommunicated by the Pope. Threats were of no avail, and Raymond held to his legacy as most heirs do under similar claims. One night some one knocked loudly at Raymond’s door.

“Who is there?” he cried in a trembling voice.

“I am Orthon, and I come on behalf of the Catalan.”

After a parley he left, nothing accomplished, but returned night after night in some strange form of man or beast or wraith or spook or masquerader and so annoyed Raymond that he was driven into madness, the Catalan finally coming to his own.

At Nay, Gaston Phœbus is said to have built a sort of modest country house which in later centuries became known simply as La Maison Carrée. Perhaps Gaston Phœbus built it, and perhaps he did not, for its architecture is of a very late Renaissance. At any rate it has a charming triple-galleried house-front, quite in keeping with the spirit of mediævalism which one associates with a builder who has “ideas” and is not afraid of carrying them out, and this was Gaston’s reputation. The house is on record as having one day been occupied by the queen of Navarre, Jeanne d’Albret.

Just beyond Coarraze is Betharrem whose “Calvary” and church are celebrated throughout the Midi. From the fifteenth of August to the eighth of September it is a famous place of pilgrimage for the faithful of Béarn and Bigorre, a veritable New Jerusalem. Its foundation goes back to antiquity, but its origin is not unknown, if legend plays any part in truthful description.

One day, too far back to give a date, a young and pious maiden fell precipitately into the Gave. She could not swim and was sinking in the waters, when she called for the protection of the Virgin Mary. At that moment a tree trunk, leaning out over the river, gave way and fell into the waters; the maiden was able to grasp it and keep afloat, and within a short space was drifted ashore. There is nothing very unplausible about this, nothing at all miraculous; and so it may well be accepted as a legend based on truth.

A modest chapel was built near at hand, by some pious folk, to commemorate the event, or perhaps it was built – as has been claimed – by Gaston IV himself, on his return from the Crusades in the middle of the twelfth century. The latter supposition holds good from the fact that the place bears the name of the city by the Jordan.

Montgomery burned the chapel during the religious wars, but again in the seventeenth century, Hubert Charpentier, licencié of the Sorbonne, came here and declared that the configuration of the mountain resembled that where took place the crucifixion, and accordingly erected a Calvary dedicated to “Our Lady,” “in order,” as he said, “to revivify the faith which Calvinism had nearly extinguished.”

Saint-Pé-de-Bigorre, lying midway between Pau and Lourdes, is an ideally situated, typical small town of France. It is not a resort in any sense of the word, but might well be, for it is as delightful as any Pyrenean “station” yet “boomed” as a cure for the ills of folk with imaginations.

It is a genuine garden-city. Its houses, strung out along the banks of the Gave, are wall-surrounded and tree-shaded, nearly every one of them. But one hotel extends hospitality at Saint Pé to-day, but soon there will be a dozen, no doubt, and then Saint Pé will be known as a centre where one may find “all the attractions of the most celebrated watering-places.”

To-day Saint Pé depends upon its ravishing site and its historic past for its reason for being. It derives its name from the old Abbey of Saint-Pé-de-Générès (Sanctus Petrus de Generoso), founded here in the eleventh century, by Sanchez-Guillaume, Duc de Gascogne, in commemoration of a victory. This monastery, with its abbatial church, was razed during the religious wars by the alien Montgomery who outdid in these parts even his hitherto unenviable cruelties. The church was built up anew, from such of its stones as were left, into the present edifice which serves the parish, but nothing more than the tower and the apse are of the original structure.

To Lourdes is but a dozen kilometres by road or rail from Saint Pé. In either case one follows along the banks of the Gave with delightful vistas of hill and dale at every turn, and always that blue-purple curtain of mountains for a background.

Lourdes is perhaps the most celebrated, if not the most efficacious, pilgrim-shrine in all the world. It’s a thing to see, if only to remark the contrasting French types among the pilgrims that one meets there – the Breton from Pont Aven or Quimperlé, the Norman from the Pays de Caux, the Parisian, the Alsaçien, the Niçois and the Tourangeau. All are here, in all stages of health and sickness, vigorous and crippled. The shrine of “Our Lady of Lourdes” is all things to all men. Lourdes is a beastly, unclean, and uncomfortable place in which to linger, in spite of its magnificent situation, and its great and small hotels with all manner of twentieth-century conveniences.

It’s a plague-spot on fair France, looking at it from one point of view; and a living superstition of Christendom from another. The medical men of France want to close it up; the churchmen and hotel keepers want to keep it open. Arguments are puerile, so there the matter stands; and neither side has gained an appreciable advantage over the other as yet.

Lourdes was one day the capital of the ancient seigneurie, Lavedan-en-Bigorre, and at that time bore the name of Mirambel, which in the patois of the region signified beautiful view. Originally it was but a tiny village seated at the foot of a rock, and crowned by the same château which exists to-day, and which in its evolution has come down from a castellum-romain, a Carlovingian bastille, a Capetian and English prison of state, a hospital for the military, a barracks, to finally being a musée.

Of the château of the feudal epoch nothing remains save two covered ways, the donjon, a sixteenth-century gate and a drawbridge, this latter probably restored out of all semblance to its former outlines. One of these covered ways gave access to the upper stages with so ample a sweep that it became practically a horse stairway upon which cavaliers and lords and ladies reined their chargers.

The donjon is manifestly a near relation to that of Gaston Phœbus at Foix, though that prince had no connection with the château. Transformation has changed all but its outlines, its fosse has become a mere sub-cellar, and its windows have lost their original proportions.

The Château de Lourdes was undoubtedly a good defence in its day in spite of its present attenuated appearance. In 1373 it resisted the troops of Charles V, commanded by the Duc d’Anjou. Under the ancient French monarchy its career was most momentous, though indeed merely as a prison of state, or a house of detention for political suspects. Many were the “lettres de cachet” that brought an unwilling prisoner to be caged here in the shadow of the Pyrenees, as if imbedded in the granite of the mountains themselves.

The rock which supports the château rises a hundred metres or so above the Gave. A great square mass – the donjon – forms the principal attribute, and was formerly the house of the governor. This donjon with a chapel and a barracks has practically made up the ensemble in later years.

Here, on one of the counterforts of the Pyrenees, just beyond the grim old château, and directly before the celebrated Pic du Ger, now desecrated by a cog-railway, where the seven plains of Lavedan blend into the first slopes of the mountains, were laid the first stones of the Basilique de Lourdes in 1857.

Previously the site was nothing more than a moss-grown grotto where trickled a fountain that, for ages, had been the hope of the incurably ill, who thought if they bathed and drank and prayed that miracles would come to them and they would be made whole again.

The fact that the primitive, devout significance of this sentiment has degenerated into the mere pleasure seeking of a mixed rabble does not affect in the least the simple faith of other days. The devout and prayerful still come to bathe and pray, but they are lost in the throng of indiscriminately “conducted” and “non-conducted” tourists who make of the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes a mere guide-book sight to be checked off the list with others, such as the Bridge of Sighs, the Pyramids of Gizeh, the Tour Eiffel, or Hampton Court, – places which once seen will never again be visited.

To-day only the smaller part of the visitors, among even the French themselves, excepting the truly devout, who are mostly Bretons – will reply to the question as to whether they believe in Lourdes: “Oui, comme un article de foi.”

No further homily shall be made, save to say that the general aspect of the site is one of the most picturesque and enchanting of any in the Pyrenees – when one forgets, or eliminates, the signs advertising proprietary condiments and breakfast foods.

It doesn’t matter in the least whether one Frenchman says: “C’est ma Foi;” or another “C’est un scandale;” the landscape is gloriously beautiful. Of the Grotto itself one can only remark that its present-day garnishings are blatant, garish and offensive. The great, slim basilica rises on its monticule as was planned. It has been amply endowed and extravagantly built. Before it is a perron, or more properly a scala-sancta, and the whole is so theatrically disposed, with a great square before it, that one can quite believe it all a stage-setting and nothing more.

As a place of pilgrimage, Lourdes is perhaps the most popular in all the world, certainly it comes close after Jerusalem and Rome. Alphonse XIII, the present ruler of Spain, made his devotions here in August, 1905.

Argelès is practically a resort, and has the disposition of a Normandy village; that is, its houses are set about with trees and growing verdure of all sorts. For this reason it is a delightful garden city of the first rank.

Argelès’ chief attraction is its site; there are no monuments worth mentioning, and these are practically ruins. Argelès is a watering-place pure and simple, with great hotels and many of them, and prices accordingly.

Above Argelès the Gave divides, that portion to the left taking the name of Gave de Cauterets, while that to the right still retains the name of Gave de Pau.

Cauterets has, in late years, become a great resort, due entirely to its waters and the attendant attractions which have grouped themselves around its établissement. The beneficial effect of the drinking or bathing in medicinal waters might be supposed to be somewhat negatived by bridge and baccarat, poker and “petits chevaux” but these distractions – and some others – seem to be the usual accompaniments of a French or German spa.

“C’est le premier jour de septembre que les bains des Pyrénées commencent à avoir de la vertu.” Thus begins the prologue to Marguerite de Navarre’s “Heptameron.” The “season” to-day is not so late, but the queen of Navarre wrote of her own experiences and times, and it is to be presumed she wrote truly.

A half a century ago Cauterets was a dirty, shabby village, nearly unknown, but the exploiter of resorts got hold of it, and with a few medical endorsements forthwith made it the vogue until now it is as trim and well-laid-out a little town as one will find.

The town is a gem of daintiness, in strong contrast to the surrounding melancholy rocks and forests of the mountainside. Peaks, approximating ten thousand feet in height, rise on all sides, and dominate the more gentle slopes and valleys, but still the general effect is one of a savage wildness, with which the little white houses of the town, the electric lights and the innumerable hotels – a round score of them – comport little. Certainly the beneficial effects accruing to semi-invalids here might be supposed to be great – if they would but leave “the game” alone.

A simple mule path leads to the Col de Riou back of Cauterets, though it is more frequented by tourists on foot than by beasts of burden.

Here on the Col itself, in plain view of the Pic du Midi and its sister peaks, the Touring Club has erected one of those admirable guide-book accessories, a “table d’orientation.”

On its marbled circumference are traced nearly three hundred topographical features of the surrounding landscape, and a study of this well-thought-out affair is most interesting to any traveller with a thought above a table d’hôte. Throughout the region of the Pyrenees these circular “tables d’orientation,” with the marked outlines of all the surrounding landscape, are to be found on many vantage grounds. The principal ones are: —

On the Ramparts of the Château de Pau.

The Col d’Aspin.

The Col de Riou.

Platform of the Tour Massey at Tarbes.

Platform de Mouguerre.

Summit of the Pic du Midi.

Summit of the Cabaliros.

Summit of the Canigou.

Over the Col de Riou and down into the Gave de Pau again, and one comes to Luz. Luz is curiously and delightfully situated in a triangular basin formed by the water-courses of the Gave de Pau and the Gave de Barèges. Practically Luz is a ville ancienne and a ville moderne, the older portion being by far the most interesting, though there is no squalor or unusual picturesqueness. Civic improvements have straightened out crooked streets and razed tottering house fronts and thus spoiled the picture of mediævalism such as artists – and most others – love.

A ruined fortress rises on a neighbouring hill-top which gives a note of feudal times, but the general aspect of Luz, and its neighbouring pretty suburb of St. Sauveur, each of them possessed of thermal establishments, are resorts pure and simple, which, indeed, both these places were bound to become, being on the direct route between Pau and Tarbes and Gavarnie, and neighbours of Cauterets and Barèges.

Barèges lies just eastward of Luz on a good carriage road. Like Bagnères-de-Bigorre, it is an oddly named town which depends chiefly upon the fact that it is a celebrated thermal station for its fame. It sits thirteen hundred metres above the sea, and while bright and smiling and gracious in summer, in winter it is as stern-visaged as a harpy, and about as unrelenting towards one’s comfort. Only this last winter the mountain winds and snows caved in Barèges’ Casino and a score of houses, killing several persons. There is no such a storm-centre in the Pyrenees. Barèges has got a record no one will envy, though the efficacy of its waters makes them worthy rivals of those of Bigorre and Cauterets.

The fame of Barèges’ waters goes back to the days of the young Duc du Maine, who came here with Madame de Maintenon, in 1667, on the orders of the doctor of the king. In 1760 a military hospital was founded here to receive the wounded of the Seven Years War.

Barèges is one of the best centres for mountain excursions in the Pyrenees. The town itself is hideous, but the surroundings are magnificent.

Above Saint Sauveur, Luz and Cauterets, in the valley of the Gaube, rises the majestic Vignemale, whose extreme point, the Pic Longue, reaches a height of three thousand, two hundred and ninety-eight metres, which is the greatest height of the French Pyrenees. In the year 1808, on the occasion of the coming of the Queen of Holland, spouse of Louis Bonaparte, to the Bains de Saint Sauveur, an unknown muse of poesy sang the praise of this great mountain as follows: —

 
“Roi des Monts: Despote intraitable.
Toi qui domine dans les airs,
Toi dont le trône inabordable
Appelle et fixe les éclairs!
Fier Vignemale, en vain ta cime
S’entoure d’un affreux abime
De niège et de débris pierreux;
Une nouvelle Bérénice
Ose, à côte du précipice,
Gravir sur ton front sourcilleux!”
 

Each of the thermal stations in these parts possesses its own special peak of the Pyrenees. Luchon has the Nethou; Bigorre the Pic du Midi de Bagnères; Eaux-Bonnes the Balaitous; Eaux-Chaudes the Pic du Midi d’Ossau; Vernet the Canigou and Saint Sauveur and Cauterets the Vignemale.