The next adventure awaits

We’re about to set off on our next adventure and you can follow along here.

Our destination this summer sounds rather mysterious and almost magical: The locals call this place ‘era Val d’Aran’ (the Aran Valley). It’s a remote mountainous valley in a hidden corner of Spain, near the border with France. The valley is on the northern side of the Pyrenees and yet is part of Catalunya, the rest of which lies to the south of the Pyrenees (Pirineus, in Catalan).

Nearly 10,000 people live in 20 or so villages spread along the length of the valley. The whole valley used to be cut off from the rest of Spain every winter, until a road tunnel under the mountains was built in 1948. For most of its history since 1313, the valley has been largely autonomous politically and administratively, and it now has a unique status in Catalunya.

The mother tongue of most locals isn’t Spanish or indeed Catalan, but Aranese. This a dialect of Occitan or the ‘langue d’oc’, a language once spoken across the southern third of France, Monaco and the western edge of north Italy. Each of Aranese, Catalan and Spanish are now official languages not just in Val d’Aran but across all of Catalunya.Read more