Knee-Deep in the Pyrenees

There are moments when even a fairly decent skier can be reduced to quaking beginner. It happened to me last winter at Baqueira, Spain’s premier winter resort, in a Pyrenees mountain valley called the Vall d’Aran. One brilliant morning, I wanted to try an unmarked trail. While the rest of the skiers jumped off the lifts and turned right to the regular downhill runs, I followed my guide left. Soon we were on a ledge that was a reasonable 10 yards wide, but with a heer drop of several hundred feet.

I froze. Three decades of skiing experience were wiped away. Gently coaxed by my guide--who positioned himself on the cliff side to prevent a suicidal plunge--I snow-plowed in slow motion down the winding, 200-yard-long ledge.

But fear and embarrassment were soon forgotten. Back again on a gentler, broader descent, I began to experience a serenity, intimacy and nostalgia that I’d never associated with the speed-obsessed, adrenaline-high world of downhill skiing. An overnight snowfall had left a thick blanket over the mountains in this northwest corner of the Catalan region. On the horizon, serrated peaks--rose, tan and purple--poked through smooth white slopes. In the valley, plumes of smoke from village hearths curled around the steeples of medieval stone churches.

Stopping several times along our unhurried downward path, we surveyed a postcard-perfect landscape of frozen lakes and hissing streams. The virgin snow--at 9 a.m., ours were the first tracks of the day--was almost knee deep, and our skis kicked up a powdery spray. The 20-minute run ended through a sublime patch of pine forest, each tree with its own distinct, white-robed silhouette.

My notion of a successful snow resort is one where scenery, food, culture and other distractions compensate for the hours not spent on skis. By this definition, the Vall d’Aran eminently qualifies. A five-hour drive northwest of Barcelona, this dazzling valley of a dozen villages stretches along 30 mountainous miles just across the border from France. Yet the Vall d’Aran remains one of Europe’s least-publicized winter holiday destinations. Perhaps that’s because the Alps offer more accessible and challenging ski runs. Or maybe it’s because the Spaniards are perfectly content to keep Baqueira and the rest of the valley to themselves.

Why should Americans travel to this secluded corner instead of Innsbruck or St. Moritz or Gstaad? Because the Vall d’Aran is a throwback to an era when skiers slowed down enough to notice the natural landscape and marvel at tiny, quaint communities. Also, this corner of Spain is a lot cheaper than Switzerland or Austria.

There was a time, within living memory, when even the Spaniards rarely visited the Vall d’Aran. It was only in 1948 that the Vielha tunnel--dug through more than three miles of solid mountain--opened the valley to the rest of Catalonia and Spain. Before then, the Araneses would literally hibernate in their valley, cut off like the denizens of mythical Shangri-La from the rest of the world by the snows for as many as eight months a year. The isolation helped the 6,000 or so Araneses to preserve their language (a version of the dialect spoken in the neighboring French region of Gascony) and to maintain a stubborn autonomy from the rest of Catalonia (a source of glee for many Spaniards fed up with the cranky separatism of the Catalans). Even today, it is rare to hear anything but Spanish or the local dialect spoken in this resort area. (However, many people working in the tourist industry do know some English.)

Besides the opening of the tunnel, the other great event in the Vall d’Aran’s modern history was the creation of Baqueira-Beret, founded by Spanish champion ski racer Lu Arias in 1964. The resort, which everybody calls Baqueira for short, now has 46 trails spread across the three ontiguous mountain faces of Beret, Baqueira and Bonaigua. It is the ski resort most linked to the Spanish royal family. And that’s just fine with the Araneses, who have used the monarchy as a counterweight to Catalan influence.

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King Juan Carlos has been vacationing in Baqueira (pronounced bah-KAY-rah) for 20 years. Although he skis at other Spanish resorts--Sierra Nevada, near Granada to the southeast, and El Formigal, closer to the Basque country to the north--it’s mainly out of a sense of diplomacy. His real passion, aides insist, is for the Vall d’Aran, where the royal family spends Christmas to New Year’s in their own chalet. In fact, the valley becomes a winter court for royalists, just as Majorca in the Balearic Islands serves as the summer court away from Madrid.

Last season, King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia were joined by their daughter, the Infanta Elena, her husband and the first royal grandchild. There are whispers that the other Infanta, Cristina, and her brother, Felipe, the crown prince, who didn’t show up, have become somewhat bored by all the daytime adulation in the Vall d’Aran and the tame activities at night. (The disco scene is largely confined to a club called Tiffany’s, where a live band plays heavy-metal lamenco.)

But a Who’s Who of Spanish power brokers somehow manage to make their ski vacations coincide with the annual royal sojourn in Baqueira. Prime Minister Jose Mar Aznar, several members of his conservative cabinet and their families were here during my visit last winter. Also seen on he slopes was Judge Baltazar Garz, the stern socialist who has made old age miserable for Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet by seeking his extradition to stand trial in Spain for human-rights atrocities. Even Jordi Pujol, the feisty Catalan nationalist and president of Catalonia’s regional government, felt obliged to helicopter up here from Barcelona for a photo op with their majesties.

The monarchs are quite generous when it comes to sprinkling stardust on Vall d’Aran establishments. Almost all the better restaurants and hotels have framed pictures of the smiling Juan Carlos and Sofia standing next to the owners or managers. At several of the local Romanesque churches I visited, the priests let drop that the royal family had been there for Sunday services.

Occasionally, there is a remarkable, unchronicled act of defiance in the Vall d’Aran. I came across it inadvertently while being served the best meal of my four-day sojourn in the valley last January. This was at Es de Don Juan, a restaurant in the village of Unha, about five miles est of Baqueira. When I remarked to the owner, Carmen Capel, that I thought her cooking at the very least merited a royal photo on the wall, she sighed and spoke of the cross she has had to bear.

It seems the monarchs have tried on three different occasions to reserve a table for dinner, but were turned down by Dona Carmen. “What could I do?” she asked. “They always phoned at 7:30 p.m. and we were already fully booked. The last time, their valet, or whatever you call him, got huffy and asked, ‘Senora, what do you have against this family?’ ‘Nothing,’ I told him. But urely the monarchs wouldn’t want me to take a table away from their subjects?”

I hope Juan Carlos and Sofia will call again, perhaps earlier in the day. Otherwise, they will miss out on a menu that pleases the palates of gourmet and gourmand. I started with an olla aranesa, a thick soup of vegetables, chickpeas, meatballs, chicken and sausage that probably had been simmering since the season’s first snowfall. The various second courses spread out before me consisted of homemade pork-and-rabbit pate and duck foie gras, a potato omelet and melon with ham. The main dish was lamb braised and baked with chanterelles, peppers and prunes--the meat so tender that it fell away from the bone at a nudge of the fork. For dessert, there was crema aranesa, very much like crema catalana or creme brulee, only better.

Afterward, I sipped several homemade spice after-dinner drinks and took in the thoroughly rustic surroundings. In the snow-covered garden, an aged German shepherd bounded without success after thick-furred wild cats that fled uphill toward a small, beautiful Romanesque church at least eight centuries old.

Among the other restaurants I tried during my sojourn, the most famous was Casa Irene, an obligatory stop for the socially prominent and those who aspire to be. In the town of Arties, about seven miles west of Baqueira, the restaurant is rated one star by the Guide Michelin and has stone floors, ecclesiastical paintings on its wood walls and soft classical music. Opting for the fixed-price menu, I start with a spicy pork pate, followed by a duck-ham salad of arugula and lettuce and pomegranate seeds, and a pig’s foot with a bit of choucroute and hot potato salad. Somewhere in between, I had Casa Irene’s sophisticated version of olla aranesa, in which a broth is poured over a terrine of meat and vegetables. I preferred the more authentic heartiness of the dish served at Es de Don Juan and at Et Restille, a converted stable in Gar, a village about a mile east of Casa Irene.

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At Baqueira, like at many winter resorts, most visitors prefer to eat a light lunch and spend as much time as possible on the slopes. But most days I decided to quit skiing around 2 p.m., eat a hearty meal and use the afternoons to explore the Vall d’Aran’s other attractions. (Besides, if the royals had trouble getting a table at night during the height of the season, what chance would us plebes have?)

For a deeper view of the valley’s history, several locals had suggested I look up Father Jusep Amiell, who was born in the nearby village of Gars and now oversees all 29 churches in the valley. He is a tall, gaunt, soft-spoken priest in his late 60s who celebrates Mass in Aranese, Catalan and Spanish at his own church in Vielha. I visited him in Vielha, the largest community in the Vall d’Aran, on an overcast day.

The Araneses, he explained, were so poor and isolated that feudal lords didn’t want to claim them as serfs or subjects, unlike most other Spaniards. “They pledged loyalty only to the king,” Father Amiell said.

Not that this made the Araneses immune to marauding bands from Gascony. The attacks account for the additions to the original 12th- and 13th-century Romanesque architecture of the valley’s churches. Most had their towers lengthened like Italian campaniles--to serve as watchtowers. In the case of Amiell’s church in Vielha, the alterations were even more extensive. Remnants of a fortified wall still exist well beyond the courtyard, and the church itself was expanded by half.

The churches in the nearby villages of Salard, Unha and Bossst boast more authentic Romanesque styles, with small windows, darkly somber interiors and semicircular Roman arches in their ceilings, rather than Gothic vaults and external buttresses. Yet the Vielha church, known as San Miquel, has the best ecclesiastical art. This includes a series of retablos, holy images ainted on wood, behind the altar. Standing closer to the main entrance is the Mig Aran Christ, a true masterpiece. It is a fragment of a much larger 12th century polychrome wood sculpture of esus being lifted off the cross. The face has an expression of exquisite repose that communicates a sudden release from mortal suffering.

The rest of the sculpture was destroyed in a 15th century raid from Gascony. But the greatest damage to religious inventory in the valley took place during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, when only three or four churches were left standing. Amiell remembers the time well. The Vall d’Aran was a Republican stronghold, and resentment at the Roman Catholic Church’s alliance with Franco unleashed a campaign of arson against ecclesiastical property. “Since people couldn’t bring themselves to burn their own church, each village agreed to set fire to their neighbor’s church,” recalled the priest, who was only 8 when he witnessed his local church being put to the torch.

Amiell left to study for the priesthood and was assigned to parishes elsewhere in Spain for decades before his appointment back in the Vall d’Aran a few years ago. He never came across other Amiells in the rest of the country and always wondered about the origins of his unusual family name. The mystery was finally solved during a recent trip to the Holy Land, where he found 52 entries for Amiell--the name is Sephardic--listed in the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem phone books. “Obviously, my family converted to Catholicism centuries ago,” he said.

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I was back in my hotel by sundown every evening. Except for one brief reconnaissance visit to Tiffany’s, the disco, I pretty much kept early hours, falling asleep with a mystery novel and ready for another go at the slopes by 8:30 a.m., when the lifts crank up. I preferred the Hotel Montarto, in Baqueira, because it is an easy walk to the 16 ski lifts. The hotel’s bar is an especially popular hangout with skiers after the lifts close. The Parador Don Gaspar de Portola, in the village of Arties, is more luxurious, with a more spacious lobby and larger, more elegant rooms. Guests there either drive to overcrowded parking lots next to Baqueira-Beret, or hop a ride on the tractor-pulled carts that shuttle skiers between their hotels and the resort slopes.

Most of the 24 trails at Baqueira proper are marked “difficult.” (Personally, I think this is in deference to the more limited skiing abilities of the Spaniards, compared to, say, the Swiss or Austrians. In the Alps, most Baqueira trails wouldn’t rate above “intermediate.”) The resort’s easier runs are found among the 15 trails at Beret, adjoining Baqueira on the west. And the resort’s seven remaining trails--ranging from “intermediate” to “very difficult”--are at Bonaigua, abutting Baqueira to the east. The resort also has several highly rated snowboard slopes.

One morning, I decided to drive up to Bonaigua, named after a frozen lake at its base. Fewer people use the ski lifts there because the downhill run is relatively short and distant from other trails. But for me, that was a bonus--along with the cliff’s-edge cafe, where I could relax after skiing.

The drive up to Bonaigua was along a road of switchback and hairpin curves. Snowbanks buried the trunks of the closest evergreens. Their branches groaned under a heavy white coat. I had to ight the dangerous temptation to gaze at the gorgeous valley below, with its sparkling river bordered by boulders and forest.

Arriving at Bonaigua, I parked my car in an almost empty lot, snapped on my skis and hopped on a chairlift that took me 8,250 feet above sea level--the highest starting point for a ski run in the entire Baqueira resort. The only skiers ahead of me were a half-dozen Spanish mountain troops doing a fast slalom.

The sunshine was strong enough to tempt me to linger over another cup of cocoa at a table outside the cafe on a snowy ledge. I contemplated the tasteful clusters of new villas in the valley far below and thought about the real estate prices that have soared along with the Vall d’Aran’s growing appeal as a travel destination for Spaniards. According to a survey I read in a newspaper a few days before, this has become one of the most expensive locations in Spain per square foot of residential space. In a single generation, incomes have vaulted from Third World levels to Swiss-style affluence. And since the Araneses own the property, they tend to be the employers in the valley. It’s hard not to notice that most waiters, hotel staff and ski resort maintenance workers come from elsewhere in Spain.

Jose Calbet, mayor of Vielha, recalls when everybody in the Vall d’Aran was a farmer or a smuggler (mainly of French wines, liqueurs and tobacco), and the only means of locomotion were bicycles and horses. “We’re standing on what was once my family’s wheat field,” he said, as we talked in the second-floor office of his hotel. The rest of the field lies beneath ski shops, clothing boutiques and restaurants that line Vielha’s main street. “We Araneses always had entrepreneurial instincts, but they were dormant,” Calbet said. “We’ve learned a lot from the foreigners”--a term that for the Araneses embraces Catalans, Basques and Castilians as well as non-Spaniards.

And they continue to learn. With prosperity at hand, the Araneses are now displaying a concern for ecology and architectural heritage that their parents would have scoffed at. Forest land cannot be touched, even if this means no new ski trails. New residences must mimic the stonemasonry and contours of traditional peasant homes--and, in fact, from a distance, the chalets and condominiums integrate quite well with the gray stone walls and red tile roofs in the medieval villages.

Though the Vall d’Aran has more cachet in the winter, the valley is a major summer destination for trekkers and campers who visit the nearby thermal springs and spa at Caldes de Bo 3/8 and the Aigues Tortes Park, Catalonia’s only national park. Both are closed from late fall to spring because of the heavy snowfalls. But in summer the area is a sublime checkerboard of lush woodlands and wildflower fields.

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I decided to spend my last day exploring the more pristine winter landscapes. I drove six miles inland from the highway along a steep, icy country lane that wriggles through a snow-covered pasture and dense forest before ending at an inn called the Banhs de Treds. It is built on the ruins of an early 19th century spa. Hot sulfurous waters from an underground spring feed a small, steamy outdoor pool just a few steps away from a pine-wood sauna. I shivered at the thought of a dip in this subfreezing weather.

Instead, I put on some old-fashioned racket-shaped snowshoes. At first, I felt as if I was walking on miniature mattresses. But soon enough, I was in rhythm, shifting my weight deliberately from one leg to the other in a side-to-side forward motion.

My destination was a mountain peak called the Circo de Colomers, a two-hour, clearly marked trek and only about 1,000 feet higher than the 5,300-foot altitude of the Banhs de Treds. I met absolutely nobody en route--not a vehicle-driver, not a hut dweller, not even a cross-country skier. A solitary eagle circled above and then, apparently sighting prey, swooped down over a distant ledge.

At the summit of Colomers, I retrieved a ham-and-cheese sandwich from my knapsack and became mesmerized by the spectacular Pyrenean panorama. I counted more than 20 lakes, frozen gems in different shades of blue, green and gray. Rivers and streams wound through woodland and exploded in white cascades. An incredibly varied geology protruded through the snow: stone formations, sometimes as crenulated like buttes, sometimes as smooth as vertical slabs, occasionally as jagged as shark’s teeth.

It took me less than two hours to snowshoe my way back to the inn. The pool was far more inviting now that I’d worked up a sweat. I swam a few leisurely laps and treaded the bath-temperature water until the freezing air made my ears tingle. Then I sprinted to the sauna through 10 yards of snow.

It occurred to me that the Banhs de Treds could make my short list for New Year’s Eve 2000. Alas, the innkeeper informed me, I was two years too late to reserve.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Guidebook: Visiting Vall d’Aran

Telephone numbers and prices: The area code for Spain is 34, the prefix for Vall d’Aran is 973, followed by six digits for the local number. All prices are approximate and computed at a rate of 158 pesetas to the dollar. Room rates are for a double for one night with breakfast. Meal prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: Delta, United, TWA, Luthansa, British Airways and Air France have connecting flights from Los Angeles to Barcelona. American connects with Iberia Airlines. The Vall d’Aran is a five-hour drive from Barcelona. Cars can be rented at the airport. In winter, be sure to ask for snow tires. From Barcelona, take the A-7 Autopista (Superhighway) south to the A-2, which runs west toward Lerida (Lleida in Catalan). Exit there and pick up route N-230 heading north to the Vall d’Aran.

Where to stay: Hotel Montarto, Nucleo 1200 Baqueira Beret, 25598 Sarard-Lleida, telephone 644-444, fax 645-200. Easy walking distance to the Baqueira ski lifts. Rooms are a bit cramped but have enough storage space. Rate: $78. Another good choice--and a bit more luxurious--is the Parador Don Gaspar de Portola, Baqueira-Beret, 25599 Lleida, in the village of Arties, a 10-minute drive from Baqueira, tel. 640-801, fax 641-001. Rate: $118. The Banhs de Treds, tel. 53-003, is a hot-spring inn tucked deep in the mountains that’s reached by turning off the main Vall d’Aran road at Salard and heading south about six miles. Since the road can be snowed in, save this place for your last day and ask to be picked up by the innkeeper (and returned to your parked car at the end of your stay). There are six ample rooms ($108) and an enormous suite ($195). The food is simple, good and hearty.

Where to eat: Most restaurants have fixed-price menus that offer options only for entrees and desserts. Es de Don Juan, in the village of Unha, tel. 645-751, is the locals’ favorite because the food is copious, unpretentious and superb. Closed in November; $45. Casa Irene, in the village of Arties, tel. 644-364, fax 642-174. This Michelin one-star rated restaurant offers the sort of refined recipes one finds in major Spanish and French cities, drawing a chic, socially prominent clientele; $62-$82. Et Restille, a converted stable in the village of Garos, tel. 641-539, is acclaimed for its olla aranesa, the hearty vegetable and meat stew that is the region’s most famous dish; $25.

For more information: Tourist Office of Spain, 8383 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, Calif., 90211; tel. (323) 658-7188, fax (323) 658-1061, Internet https://www.okspain.org.