Vicdessos
Gateway to the Pallars valley of Spain
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What amazes me most about Vicdessos is that it is a long way up a steep canyon from Tarascon, yet it only took two days for our walking characters from our Fairytale to get here from Varilhes, close to Pamiers!
By car one winds up a canyon with several areas of narrow meadows and several villages hanging on to its sides. A noisy, raging torrent was roaring down the middle of the valley when I passed by, with rain and snow falling in the canyon. No doubt this is why our pair of lovers traveled this route in summer.
Vicdessos city looks like this:
The mountains in the distance are what one needs to cross to get into Spain. Luckily there are passes, peaks do not need to be scaled, but even the passes are high and rocky and treacherous to pedestrians. The two photos below show a village that lies above Vicdessos and sunlight streaming in from the Spanish side. It is likely this pass that our friends walked to get to Lladros in the Pallars.
From where the above photos were taken, Vicdessos and the type of mountains that ringed its valley could be readily seen. They were formidable.
From our high vantage point, Vicdessos can be seen, and its valley can be seen to be the home of several small villages!
Moving back down allowed another shot of Vicdessos, much as it may have looked to our intrepid walking party 700 years ago:
Along the way down the mountain back to Vicdessos, several of the old trails could be seen that were used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years to cross these mountains. Where they joined the current main road they were the size of roads, but if you follow them to any length into the woods they become obvious wagon and foot trails.
Returning to Vicdessos allowed the river to be seen doing its thing:
To have a viable town, bridges were built, well before the time of Beatrice and Barthelemy. Bridges in the Pyrenees still stand that go back to Roman times.
The sun was setting by the time I went back down the mountain to drive into the southeastern Pyrenees for a night's stay in the Cerdagne Valley, which has naught to do with the Fairytale, as explained in my Travelogue.
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