Crossing over to the other side

Clouds and rain moved in pre-dawn on Thursday, our last scheduled day in Vall de Boí, so instead of going on another hike, we went to France. We had not planned to go to France. We went because the drive from Barcelona to Vall de Boí had taken about eight hours, twice as long as we had expected thanks to our taking "the scenic route." (Stefan, who had done all the driving, thought being in the car on curvy mountain roads for several hours was the bees knees. This made me think of all the how-far-can-you-drive-in-how-little-time vacations my family took when I was a kid, and reminded me again of the many ways in which I seem to have married my dad.) Elias and I nixed the idea of spending another long day as passengers on winding mountain roads, and our topo-maps indicated that just north of the Pyrenees, France was pretty flat and the highways pretty straight. The route was longer, but we figured it would be quicker. Thus we found ourselves in the glorious empire of highway roundabouts.

Our sojourn was limited to the Ariège valley, where medieval castles, ruins, monasteries, and cloisters abound. It was in Ariège that the pacifist, anti-materialist Cathars set up camp in the 12^th century and made a heroic effort to survive the 13^th before being quashed and massacred by fed-up allegiance-demanding materialist feudal lords and the Catholic Church.

The highpoint of our day was a stop in Saint Lizier. Reigning over the top of the town's highest hill is the medieval Palais des Évêques (Bishop's Palace), the walls of which enclose the church Notre-Dame de la Sède. When the bishopric of Couserans was terminated in 1801, the palace variously served as a prison, workhouse, and lunatic asylum. A relatively recent restoration of the church revealed, beneath 19^th-century woodwork, a stunning spread of 15^th-century paintings on the vaulted ceiling and on many of the walls. The paintings borrow the Sybils of ancient Greece to prophecy the family tree of--and thus the coming of--Christ.

Down the hill from the Palais is the 12^th century Cathédrale Saint-Lizier, named for Saint Lizier's 6th-century proselytizing bishop. A stately adjacent cloister lets only a little loose with its virtuosic carved column capitals--apparently the standard way for Romanesque cloisters to keep up with the Joneses.


We stopped for the night in Foix, a town dominated by the hill-top Château de Foix. The Château's first tower was built around 1000 CE, the third tower about 400 years after that. The castle served as home to generations of counts of Foix, including Henri III of Navarre, who graduated from counthood to become France’s King Henri IV, and local hero Gaston Fébus. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the castle was used as a prison. Perhaps a prisoner was responsible for this coq graffiti in one of the tower stairwells:

Incidentally, the English-language Wikipedia entry on Foix, written perhaps by a prickly native Foixian tired of all the tourists, somewhat petulantly lists but one local point of interest: the botanical garden, with its collection of cacti succulents. The French entry, in contrasts, skips the garden and goes for the Château.

Despite these delights, what actually drew us to Foix was some even older history: the late Paleolithic cave paintings in the nearby Grotte de Niaux. The oldest and youngest carbon-datable paintings (those containing charcoal) are ~13,800 and 12,800 years old; the paintings made with red iron oxide and manganese oxide are, alas, undatable. For reasons unknown, near the end of the last ice age, over a period of at least one thousand years, Magdelenian Cro-Magnons trekked with torches and oil lamps some 900 meters into the cave into a nicely symmetric vaulted cavern with amazing acoustics, where they then executed masterful drawings of bison, horses, ibexes, and stags. In another part of the cave, not viewable by the general public, there’s a drawing of a weasel--the only known weasel among all the prehistoric cave paintings in Europe. Because the paintings are rare, irreplaceable, and fragile, cavern tours are limited to groups of 25, led by a guide. A slippery 0.9 km later, at the opening of the "Salon Noir" (Black Room), everyone but the guide turns off and sets aside their individual flashlights, to limit the light shining on the paintings. Visits in the Black Room are limited to 25 minutes at a time, so as not to overload the walls with carbon dioxide.

I've been to Europe often enough to get used to seeing 1,000-year-old art; seeing 14,000-year-old art* took my breath away.

*"Art" or "craftsmanship"? The tour guide warned against projecting modern sensibilities on prehistoric images.