The theatre group "Sorgin Haizeak" performed in the village square

Before I went to Zugarramurdi, I had consigned witches to history.

When I was a child, every time I went to bed I jumped in as quickly as possible. I was convinced that the witch which lived in the cupboard underneath would grab my legs. But I stopped believing in God when I was fourteen, and with him, the devil, witches, fairies, hobgoblins, and other charlatans.

Witches, I thought, might genuinely believe that they had exceptional powers or, more likely, pretend in order to gain money or prestige. But true witches had never existed. And clearly fakes were of no interest. Witchcraft was too cutesy for a 14-year-old boy. Too full of clichés for a grown-up man.

Even when I walked the GR10 and passed within a frog’s leap of Zugarramurdi, I didn’t make the detour. Then last Saturday I went there and changed my mind.

I only went because it  was the first fine day for a week, and we needed to get out. “There’s a midsummer Witch Day,” I said to Veronica. “Let’s go.”

III Día de las brujas en Zugarramurdi [3rd Zugarramurdi Witch Day]

Barrenetxea: Graziana de Barrenetxea "the queen of the coven" lived here. She died in prison

When we arrived a witch was unpacking her broomstick from the boot of her car. Later we saw her selling her wares at a stall in the street market (sorry, no toads today). There were people who could interpret Tarot cards and a man who could read your palm – incongruously dressed in a Chinese kimono and hat. A shop selling pottery witches – old hags on broomsticks. The usual meaningless commercialism, I thought. And then we went to a lecture followed by a tour of the museum, and entered a different world.

A visit to the Witch Museum in Zugarramurdi is essential if you want to understand what happened in the village

Although the museum has only existed for three years, the village has been famed for witchcraft for centuries. Four centuries to be exact. In November 1610 a costly show trial was held in distant Logroño at the Inquisition headquarters. Over forty inhabitants of Zugarramurdi were investigated on suspicion of witchcraft after an impressionable young girl had reworked wild stories from Ciboure on the coast. Confessions were often extracted by torture.

By the time of the trial, after nearly two years of investigations, thirteen of the accused had already died in prison, but that didn’t deter the Inquisitors. Effigies were made and the bones of the dead disinterred, put into boxes, and brought to the dock. Thirty-six of the accused were found guilty. Twelve were burned at the stake. Although five of them had already died in prison, that didn’t deter the Inquisitors either. There were twelve people condemned to death, and twelve would be burned.

The confessions were sometimes ridiculous:

María de Jureteguía, aged 22, said that when she went to the Sabbat, her aunt rubbed her with “flying unguent”. Once, she came out of a small hole in the wall and she realised that she had shrunk. When she asked about it her aunt said not to worry, now that she was back to normal.

Another woman confessed that she had been to bed with the devil on several occasions and had subsequently given birth to twins and triplets – all of them toads, all marked with the sign of the devil.

The implausibility of the confessions didn’t deter the Inquisition either. Witchcraft was being practised in Zugarramurdi and it had to be stamped out.

One motivation for the Inquisitors was simply money. They were career-minded, and the more convictions they obtained the more they advanced. They also supplemented their incomes from the fines and confiscations. And for neighbours seeking revenge for some real or imagined slight, it was a good opportunity. Accusations of witchcraft had a great advantage over other false claims. In the law of the time, if an accusation was rejected the complainant could be punished as if he had committed the crime. Not so for accusations of witchcraft.

A modern witch in the grocery shop in Zugarramurdi

We left the museum heads full of questions. Why were witchcraft trials a phenomenon from 1450 to 1650? Why not before, nor after? How did the late medieval representation of a witch as the naked temptress, complete with broomstick between her thighs, become the modern old crone? Why has the hysteria recurred so frequently? Take Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s; communists in America in the 1950s, to quote only two modern examples. Eleven of the 36 found guilty were men, including the “King of the coven”. The men seem to have disappeared from our collective consciousness. Why? Most importantly, how did one man, Alonso Salazar Frias, a junior Inquisitor, manage to put a stop to the trials? I will have to do some research…

By the time we had listened to the lecture and gone round the museum, we were convinced that there had never been any witches – not even silly women pretending to be witches – at Zugarramurdi. If we hadn’t gone to the museum we would have been none the wiser. All around were stalls touting happy please-take-me-home witches, complete with hats, cats and bats, and of course miniature broomsticks – cashing in on the lies which had led to innocent people being tortured and burned at the stake. Truth and money make uneasy bedfellows in Zugarramurdi.

Then, in the evening we went to the “witches” cavern just outside the village for a different kind of experience. The cavern is huge – well, cavernous – and a perfect setting when you have an audience of at least a thousand to fill it. Dimly lit, it was magic. If there had only been a few participants in some occult ceremony it would have been sinister, but this evening it was enchanting.

A tame Black Sabbath

We saw, first, Oskorri, an electric-folk group playing whirling dance tunes with a distinctly Celtic tinge. They were followed by a prudish re-enactment of a witches’ coven by villagers – instead of kissing the devil’s arse, the traditional sign of allegiance, they blow him a kiss.

The factoría Alter Zinema

Finally, the cave was filled with a much more daring multimedia performance based on sex, drugs and rock and roll – or at least as near to rock-and-roll as traditional Basque folk dancing gets. A brew of primeval grunts and erotic heavy breathing from extensively painted but near-naked dancers running around the cave, was interspersed with laughably twee dance routines that could have graced an open-air tourist spectacle. I liked it. Veronica didn’t.

Not quite Basque rock-and-roll

In swirling midnight mist as we drove home, the air was full of witches. I still don’t believe in them, but I am interested in them, now. It was a good day: we came away with questions, not answers.

Basque sports derive from everyday rural life

We have each paid 30 euros to watch a man run 89 times round a bullring alone. The other competitor dropped out, but Xabier still has to run the 8.9km to the finish line in order to claim the prize. It is, as the newspaper says next day, un reto descafeinado – a decaffeinated finish.

When the competition started an hour and a half ago, there was much more adrenalin in the air. 6,000 euros is at stake in a personal bet between Ander Erasun and local lad Xabier Zaldua. They are to chop 10 logs and then run 10 km. Xabier is 32 and Ander only 18, which means that as the mid-day start nears, Ander is bookies’ favourite.

And this kind of bet is taken seriously. Deadly seriously. In March Joxe Mendizabal, a former champion aizkolari (axeman), came out of retirement. After the competition – which he lost – the doctor declared that he was fit to go out for lunch. He never arrived, collapsing on the restaurant steps: his heart suddenly stopped beating.

The competition takes place in the Plaza de Toros in Azpeitia  before 700 spectators. Mostly male and well over 40, many wear the regulation black beret. Our two bulls in the centre of the ring have a series of kanaerdikos (logs with a circumference of 54 inches – 1.37m) in front of them. They each leap onto their first log, standing with their feet apart. The axes flash up and down and the V-shaped cut grows rapidly. Ander clearly makes his own decisions, but Xavier is guided by his trainer who taps the log with a stick to show where he should chop next. Just as it seems that they risk cutting off their toes they change sides and after five minutes they have both finished their first log. There are another nine to go. Ander edges ahead but seems stiff, nervous. The crowd is attentive but not yet tense, with most of the encouragement going to the local lad: “Chabi, Chabi!” they cry.

Ander finishes the logs well before Xabier and has already sprinted – too fast – one and a half times round the edge of the arena before Xabier joins him. They run together for a while and then, to a burst of applause, Xabier passes him. Another turn of the ring and suddenly Ander starts to wobble and within 20m has hobbled to the side and is leaning dejectedly on the barrier. He is shaking his head, looking white, a paleness reflected in the face of his trainer. He is led away to the first aid tent.

Later I ask Maika, one of the few female aizkolariak, what will happen now. How can a farmer’s son afford to pay such a bet?  He can’t, she says, but the takings from the show need to be taken into account. Each of the aizkolaraki will get half. Then they will settle the bet between them. So Ander will finish up with 4,000 euros and Xavier with 16,000 euros. “I don’t think it is healthy,” she says, “there is too much money involved.”

Report on the competition (in Spanish)

One evening, I tried to walk to nearby Zubieta, plainly visible in the valley below. I could see several paths and tracks heading in the right direction, and others which arrived successfully. But joining up the ends proved impossible. Likely-looking routes led to steep escarpments or trundled merrily as far as a barn and stopped. Of course there were no waymarks.

Chastened, the next day I took my GPS with me, only to discover that the tracks marked on the map were mostly fantasies. By dint of persistence I eventually found the way. It was only then that I realised that this is what Europe must have been like two centuries ago.* A typical meadow is dissected by three or four routes. And a little higher up, in the heath, there are tracks of all kinds running in every direction. Sheep, cattle, and humans are still maintaining paths and creating new ones.

In England and Wales it is a different story. Starting with the Industrial Revolution, as the countryside emptied into towns and tyres replaced feet, footpaths fell out of use. By the 1960s action was needed to preserve those which had survived. Definitive maps were drawn up. Since then, the Ordnance Survey and local councils have taken over. They are doing for paths what turnpikes and McAdam did for roads. Ways now have Rights. They are defined in law, regulated, mapped, and protected. There are fewer of them but they are better – they have been domesticated.

Of course, not all paths appear on OS maps, but walkers are attracted to those which do. Like electricity, walkers tend to pass where there is least resistance. Other possibilities are neglected and disappear.

Here, at the western end of the Pyrenees, the process of domestication has only just begun. In the rolling hills of the Basque country, lines of communication are still undisciplined and disorganised, but alive and kicking. Wild, in fact.
—-
Graham Robb’s excellent Discovery of France describes the phenomenon as it existed in 19th century France:

When Napoleon’s statisticians first surveyed the westernmost Breton département, Finistère, they were startled to find that almost one-fifth of the total surface was taken up by ‘roads and byways’… Further studies confirmed these incredible figures. Finistère was an extreme case, but many other départements turned out to be crazed with tiny roads. (pp 143–4)

“¿Gusanos, como gusanos de tierra? – Worms, like earthworms?” I have just seen half a worm outside, left on the side of the plate after some bird’s breakfast. It looked more like a sausage than a worm.

“Yes,” she says.

We have come to see our neighbour making cheese in her farmhouse kitchen, above the cowshed. “There are 19 of them. They keep us warm,” she says.

“But I saw you buying milk in the supermarket yesterday!”

“Yes, all their milk goes to their calves. I make sheep’s cheese. The lambs have already gone.”

She grew up here and has been making cheese “since I was this high,” she says, indicating her knees.

Seven litres of sheep’s milk in a galvanised bucket, the kind you can buy in any hardware shop. Warm to 36 degrees centigrade. Pour in 2ml of liquid rennet and turn off the heat.

“Instead of rennet from a bottle you can use fresh tripe,” she explains, but she doesn’t recommend it. (Rennet is naturally present in the stomachs of all mammals – it enables us to digest our mother’s milk, and makes milk curdle.)

She offers us a cup of tea while we wait for the milk to separate. “Earl Grey, Spanish tea is tasteless,” she claims.

After 20 minutes the rennet has done its job. She whisks the curds and whey vigorously, then reheats to 39 degrees to kill the worms.

“That’s all there is to it,” she smiles, plunging her arms into the bucket, pressing the whey out of the spongy mass which has settled in the bottom and pushing it into a mould. “It’ll be ready in two months.”

Later she will boil the remaining whey to extract the curd cheese: requesón – literally re-cheese, more cheese from the same milk.

It is still cold, so in the DIY shop I buy a bow saw and ask, in halting Spanish, where I can purchase wood for the fire. The man behind the counter replies: “¿Madera? No, ¡leña! – Wood? No, firewood!” My first lesson in Spanish

“I don’t know,” he continues. Nobody here buys wood. They just cut it down. If you don’t own a forest, you find someone who does.

Finally I discover a timber yard. I am confronted by a gigantic crane, with jaws capable of lifting several complete tree trunks at once, being driven by a man of similar dimensions. “I would like a few branches for my stove,” I explain timidly. No problem. I drive into the hanger and we fill up the back of the car. Kindling, he says, is free.

On a wall of the nearby town of Doneztebe is a poster. Four hulking blokes with their names and ages, four axes, a large pile of leña, a date and a time, and “1500 euros”. The rest of the poster is in Basque, so I have to ask one of our new neighbours to translate. It’s a private bet on who can cut the most wood, with the 1500 euros going to the winner.

Although the town only boasts 1500 inhabitants, it has five different shops offering various degrees of equipment for dealing with anything from a twig to a forest. Big Mat is the largest building in town.

The Iraty forest, a stone’s throw from here, is the largest beech forest in Europe covering 173sq km.

Second lesson: although the hills abound with sheep pasture, they take wood seriously here.

So we chose the classic itinerary from France, a route pioneered by Henry Russell. It is more “technical” than the Spanish path: passing from one ledge to another involves some minor rock climbing and we are ramblers, not climbers. But, according to my guide book, the path is suitable for très bon randonneurs (very good walkers).

Refuge des Saradets and above (from L to R) the Tour, the Casque and the Brèche de Roland

Chocards à bec jaune

Evolène, Claude and I stay overnight at the Refuge des Sarradets. Near the hostel, an ermine darts from one rocky hiding place to another leaving footprints in the snow. The yellow-beaked chocards keep their distance but the niverolles come to beg for crumbs like domesticated sparrows.

Despite the nearby animation, the focus of our attention is further away: below us, the splendid natural amphitheatre of the Cirque de Gavarnie with its dramatic waterfall; above us, the long curving cliff marking the frontier ridge with Spain, its height emphasised by the Brèche de Roland, a 100m-high, 40m-wide missing tooth. The name derives from an epic poem: on the return journey from Spain, the dying Roland, “his brain coming out of his ears”, broke his sword Durandel against a rock.

Sunrise over the Cirque de Gavarnie, as seen from the Brèche de Roland

Next day, in the half-light, we scramble up the scree and frozen snow to the Brèche. Climbing through the missing tooth, we see inside the jaw, a mirror image, another long cliff stretching in both directions.

The path after the Brèche de Roland is equipped with a safety chain

The sun rises over the Cirque de Gavarnie behind us, washing the heights with blood and gold as three stout men overtake us. “This is the fifth time I have done it, but I got lost twice, missing the way up the cliff,” explains the oldest of them. “Follow us and you will be alright,” he claims. But they race ahead, quickly outdistancing us.

Now in Spain, insouciant of formalities, we turn east keeping just under the cliffs. At first, a chain is provided on the traverse across the plunging hillside. Next, at the Col des Isards we have to scramble up billowing white rocks. Then, the first snow-field appears and we put on our crampons. Finally, the path disappears into a sea of rubble. At each cairn we stop, straining to

I should be hanging onto the chain

distinguish the next one. We are stealing gradually but disconcertingly up towards the base of a near-vertical cliff face. We can see a jumble of cairns leading up the face so we head for one of them, hauling ourselves up with our hands. My insouciance is wavering.

Pico del Descargador in the Gavarnie-Ordessa National Park

“We might get up but I’m not sure how we will get down again,” I call to Evolène who has already climbed up. “Try going round,” she says. “It doesn’t seem that difficult to me but you are making me wonder if I should be more afraid.” Fear is catching and Claude has already picked up the virus: “I’m not sure either,” she wavers. But we find a way round, though it still needs hands. The climb – it is not a path, just discoloured rock punctuated by miniscule cairns to indicate the way – zigzags up the 20m to finish on a reassuring 1m-wide balcony. Finally, at the end of the balcony, we emerge into open space, safety and exhilaration.

Claude on the Épaule (looking back towards the Brèche de Roland)

Here on the frontier ridge between France and Spain, all is mineral; white, grey, black, ochre. Solid, unforgiving. Raw dislocated strata projecting at all angles, no lazy “beds” of rock. Down below us to the south, in contrast, the landscape is dreamy. The air is thin, the colours washed-out, soft. Claude points out the Pico del Descargador, a mound of white rock bands alternating with yellowing grass. “It looks like a giant stack of pancakes,” she says. Further away, deep canyons slice through the dusty layer cake.

The Étang Glacé and Mont Perdu. The route follows the ridge on the right.

Several snow-fields later and we reach the lip of the Cirque de Gavarnie at the Col de la Cascade and look down into France, into a cauldron of simmering cloud. The top of the famous waterfall, 700m below us, is only just visible. The cairns continue, keeping roughly level until another easy scramble brings us onto l’Épaule and the start of a lazy walk to the Étang Glacé.

The Etang Glacé feeds on the meltwaters of Month Perdu and then pours them into the rock at its lip. They emerge 2km away at the head of the 423m high Gavarnie waterfall. The path from Goriz passes to one side of the lake, and scores of other walkers are distributed along the ridge which leads up to the summit – scrambling up 100m of smooth rock, followed by a tiring 300m of loose scree.

Looking back down the ridge

At the summit, a brief panorama awaits us, the iridescent Lac du Marboré, the Pic du Midi with its telescopes, the Vignemale and its glacier, innumerable other summits. And then the clouds billow in from Spain abruptly severing us from the world. Only the neighbouring Swiss-roll Cylindre du Marboré remains visible.

Niverolles at the summit

Ramond, writing in 1789, gave Mont Perdu a height of 1763 toises (3436m): “Even if you have been to Mont Blanc you must come to Mont Perdu: when you have seen the highest granitic mountain, you should see the highest calcareous one.” But his interest was more scientific than aesthetic. How could calcareous deposits with fossils of sea creatures be so high? Were calcareous deposits always higher than granitic ones? Were they therefore younger? Ramond became known as the “inventor of the Pyrenees” – he brought them to public (ie Parisian) notice – and Mont Perdu and the surrounding mountains were his most famous inventions.

Cylindre du Marboré seen from Mont Perdu

“Perhaps we should go down to the refuge at Goriz.” I suggest. “My GPS didn’t work because we were too near to the cliffs and we’ll have difficulty finding our way back in the fog.” But the cloud separates briefly so we rush off while we can still see what we are doing. In Spain the clouds are churning and we hear thunder way below us to the south, but France and the frontier bask under clear skies.

At the Col de la Cascade

On the way back we look down at Gavarnie and the Cirque again. Now that the low mist in France has evaporated, the valley looks pastoral and beguilingly peaceful. But under the surface, all is not well. The early days of geology, the youth of mountaineering, and the flowering of the French Romantic movement were all written here. For this, and for the stunning contrast between the bucolic valley and its ragged heights, the area was designated a World Heritage site in 1997. Now it is under threat. An annual festival uses the Cirque as its backdrop: World Heritage status may be withdrawn.

The path drops down to below the cliffs

Back at the hostel, we sit on the steps in front of the entrance, talking about the day. “Normally it is the summit which counts,” I say, “but today it was right at the start, the moment when we stepped out onto the plateau at the end of the balcony.”

Postscript

Chocards à bec jaune

The next day it is suffocatingly hot in Gavarnie. I’ve been to the waterfall before but Evolène and Claude have only seen it in photos. An easy walk to work up an appetite for lunch, as I remember it. The other tourists, we finally notice when it is too late, are wearing hats, each carrying a rucksack, stopping from time to time to sip on a bottle of water, nibble on a cereal bar, and slather exposed parts with sun cream. We have no water, no hats, no food, no sun cream. By the time we get back three hours later we are flaking, sweat cascading off our shoulders. Inconscient is the French term. It means stupidly ill-prepared.

Details of the walk Col des Tentes – Brèche de Roland – Mont Perdu

Stream crossing just before the refuge des Sarradets

We did the walk in early August 2009. From the car park at the Col des Tentes (2208m above sea level) above Gavarnie, it took us 1h45 to get to the refuge des Saradets (2589m). The next day we walked for 10h30, to Mont Perdu (3355m) via the Brèche de Roland (2807m) and back to the refuge (rest breaks added 1h30, making 12 hours in all). Then 1h30 from the refuge to the car park on the third day. Crampons and an ice axe were essential to avoid detours, especially in the morning when the snow was still frozen.

There are several routes between the refuge and Mont Perdu. We took the high-level route, as recommended by the hostel manager, following cairns. All routes include some “easy” rock climbing (2 on the French scale) but the main problem is navigation. When we were close to the cliffs (just after the Brèche de Roland) my GPS didn’t work and the landscape is so convoluted that even large scale maps are difficult to read. Even though we had prefect conditions for the return journey we had to backtrack twice before finding the correct route. In addition, although there is only 600m of climbing, most of the day is spent at around 3000m, and even ordinary walking quickly eats up energy.

By the way, you need to like rocks. There is virtually no grass and no trees.

Accommodation: Refuge des Sarradets (also known as the refuge de la Brèche de Roland): evening meal, bed in a dormitory, breakfast, and packed lunch 42 euros. Advice on the route comes free. Fill up water bottles in the evening as the water pipe from the mountain spring freezes in the night.

A slightly different route can be found here and another one here

References

Comparing Mont Blanc and Mont Pedu: L. Ramond de Carbonnières. Voyages au Mont-Perdu et dans la partie adjacente des Hautes-Pyrénées, p. 115.

Henry Russell, Souvenirs d’un Montagnard, éditions Pyrémonde.

Thanks to Evolène and Claude for the photos.