Cirque de Gavarnie

This exceptional mountain landscape, which spreads on both sides of the present national borders of France and Spain, is centred on the Mont Perdu peak, a limestone massif that peaks at 3,352 metres. The site, with a total area of 30,639 hectares, includes two of the largest and deepest canyons in Europe on the south side, on the Spanish side, and three major cirques on the steeper north side, on the French side — classic terrestrial geological forms. The site is also a pastoral landscape reflecting a farming way of life once widespread in the mountain regions of Europe. It remained unchanged in the twentieth century in this one place in the Pyrenees, and offers priceless testimony to the European society of the past through its landscape of villages, farms, fields, high pastures and mountain roads.

← Other sites in Hautes-Pyrénées