Mont-Perdu - Gavarnie, Roland legend

Reference : FR047

AVAILABLE FOR TRADE
Size : 10 x 15 cm

"Cirque de Gavarnie - Légende de Roland"

Location of GAVARNIE in FRANCE

The Cirque de Gavarnie is a famous example of a cirque in the central Pyrenees, in the Pyrenees National Park. The cirque is 800m wide (on the deepest point) and about 3000 m wide at the top.

Major features of the cirque are La Brèche de Roland and Gavarnie Falls.

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La Brèche de Roland is an impressive natural gap, 40 m across and 100 m high, at an altitude of 2 804 m in the steep cliffs of the Cirque de Gavarnie in the Pyrenees. It forms part of the border between France and Spain.

According to legend the Brèche was cut by Count Roland (a nephew of Charlemagne) with his sword Durendal in an attempt to destroy that sword, after being defeated during the Battle of Roncevaux Pass. Roland's battle with the Saracens is celebrated in The Song of Roland, a twelfth-century chanson de geste ; Roland thrice unsuccessfully tries to destroy Durendal so it won't fall into pagan hands.

That Roland fought the Saracens is a later adaptation of the historical facts which places Christian Roland and Charlemagne against a Muslim army—in reality, Count Roland was killed in a rear-guard battle with a band of (equally Christian) Basques who had their eyes on Charlemagne's baggage train.

The Brèche can be reached from the Refuge des Sarradets, a nearby mountain shelter, in about an hour's climb.

As one of the three major cirque walls of France side
of the site PYRENEES - MONT PERDU,
the cirque of Gavarnie is registered as a UNESCO w.h.s
(the two other ones are the cirque of Estaubé
and the cirque of Troumouse).

UNESCO w.h.s. :

Pyrénées - Mont-Perdu

Date of inscription : 1997

This outstanding mountain landscape, which spans the contemporary national borders of France and Spain, is centred around the peak of Mount Perdu, a calcareous massif that rises to 3,352 m. The site, with a total area of 30,639 ha, includes two of Europe's largest and deepest canyons on the Spanish side and three major cirque walls on the more abrupt northern slopes with France, classic presentations of these geological landforms. The site is also a pastoral landscape reflecting an agricultural way of life that was once widespread in the upland regions of Europe but now survives only in this part of the Pyrénées. Thus it provides exceptional insights into past European society through its landscape of villages, farms, fields, upland pastures and mountain roads.