Isards in the Eyne valley
An ordinary weekend, walking in the Pyrenees. Completely ordinary but still magic. On Saturday, we climbed the Eyne valley, sauntering through the flower beds, our footsteps bathed in colour. Then we saw the marmotte suburb on the hillside opposite us, their holes linked by a marmotte-sized highway, although only a couple of them were braving the heat. Above, at the pass and on the frontier ridge (2800m) there were long ethereal views down to the plains on both sides. But the real highlight was the isards.
We have just crossed the Pyrenees, from Eyne in the Pyrénées-Orientales in France to the sanctuary of Núria in Catalonia in Spain, and back again. 2200m of climbing over two days, in beautiful weather. Nothing dramatic happened, although in Núria on Saturday evening the watery sausages – believe me, it is possible for sausages to be wet – should have caused a riot.
On the frontier ridge between Eyne and Núria
On the return journey, on Sunday, we had just settled down to eat lunch by the river Eyne when we saw an isard on the slope opposite. And then another, and another. A dozen in all. Old and young. One, clearly a dominant male, with a yellow collar. Gambolling, leaping… and fighting. Close by, ignoring us. More interested in a rival herd, than in us, they were defending a strategic point, though at first we couldn’t make out why. Then I remembered the woman with a donkey who told us that she had just brought a sack of salt up for the cows. We hadn’t seen where she had left the sack, but it must have been that precious taste that the isards were fighting over. We watched the spectacle for more than half an hour.
For Catalans, the Canigou mountain is a symbol of their one-time nation which straddled the Mediterranean end of the Pyrenees. For some, it is also the emblem of a nation-in-waiting, to be reconstituted from the eponymous Spanish province centred around Barcelona, and the French département of the Pyrénées-Orientales.
