FRANCE


The medieval town of


Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, dominated by its cathedral


the woods. On a distant hill, three deer are silhouetted against the sky. It’s another hot day, and the dogs take turns to drink and cool themselves in a stream that crosses the path. But this is easy work for them. “In winter, they run this route in the snow, pulling


sleds weighing 200kg,” Elodie tells me. “Sometimes they drag supplies up to people in the mountains. This walk is a holiday for them.” Like the patous and the collies, these are working dogs, fixtures of a pastoral life in the mountains. Part of a barking, frenzied way of life, it’s a tradition maintained, a link to the region’s past — albeit reshaped for its modern-day visitors.


Past and present My week in the Pyrenees is full of living traditions preserved, the past’s thread snaking its way through the everyday present. On Thursday morning, in the medieval town of Arreau, stalls are set beneath the colonnades of the covered market, as they have been for centuries. Traders cry their wares: jams made from myrtle berries, tomatoes as red as cricket balls, truckles of sheep’s cheese and Noir de Bigorre pork sausages. I taste wine from little cups as the producer swats at circling wasps. Elsewhere, a man spoons batter over a spit, making the classic gâteau à la broche, or tree cake, over an open fire. The recipe is said to have been brought back by Napoleon from one of his campaigns. Nearby, the River Neste bubbles tirelessly beneath a stone bridge. At La Barthe de Neste, I visit a pair of chocolatiers, Marie


and her brother Bernardino, at their shop, Les Flocons Pyrénéens. The shelves heave with slabs of chocolate and


piles of bonbons — all handmade by Bernardino in the laboratory-like kitchen next door. I watch him heating, pouring and folding as he works on his creations. His speciality is the flocon, a praline-centred chocolate based on a recipe dating to the 1800s. But Bernardino taps into the spirit of our own times too. “Our bestseller is the Chocolat Virus,” says Marie, handing me a chocolate ball dotted with strawberry and raspberry icing that apparently looks like a coronavirus cell under a microscope. In the foothills 12 miles to the east, I explore the town of


Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges, its 16th-century buildings displaying magnificent half-timbering and herringbone brickwork. Its imposing cathedral contains the remains of its builder, St Bertrand, as well as an incongruous stuffed crocodile, which has dangled from a wall here for as long as anyone can remember. Today, walkers following the route to Santiago de


Compostela, in northwest Spain, tread in the footsteps of generations of pilgrims, an ever-growing plumb-line of people descending through the ages. But it’s close by, at the Caves of Gargas, where


mankind’s line drops deepest. A guide leads me through a hillside entrance into low-lit chambers with stalactites that seem more soſt than solid, bulging like jellyfish or cascading to the floor in great pleats like gathered curtains. These caves were discovered in 1906 but had been occupied from prehistory up to the Middle Ages. My guide points his torch at a wall, and from the gloom


emerge the outlines of dozens of hands, stencilled in reds and blacks. “These were made 27,000 years ago,” he whispers. “The cave people placed their hands on


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