Andorra: A Study in Mountain Geography

Abstract

HE geographic factors back of the anomalous independence of Andorra, lying between two great countries, are Pyrenean rather than purely Andorran. The Pyrenees are not as sharp a divide between France and Spain as they are generally credited with being. At places along the summit of the range it is difficult to judge where the water divide may be. Nor is there a cultural divide, for the Catalans are found in almost equal strength on the two slopes of the eastern end, as are the Basques at the western. The summit of the eastern portion of the range is an uplifted and youthful plain. Here are vast pastures known by the Catalan as plas. With pastoral life as a prime element in the existences of both the Spanish and French mountaineers, these pastures are, in summer, the true focus of the local economies. The extent of pasture rights held by the people is as important a measure of the prosperity of the valley communes as is the amount of cultivated land. Indeed the communes frequently hold privileges upon the pla land in disregard of the national boundaries. The flocks and herds of the two people mix here. A bond, born of long contact with each other and a common set of economic problems, is established by people of two nations. Though more particularly so in the past, even today the Pyrenees are a zone of transition rather than a sharp boundary between governments and cultures. So differentiated has this mountain zone been from the flanking plains that the separatist tendency, common to mountain peoples, is here well illustrated. As in Switzerland, there was in this range for three centuries a little-known federation. The mountaineers, regardless of national intentions of Spain or France, maintained a state possessing frontiers, public law, and a political consciousness.' This federation was bound together largely by the pla terrain. Bareges, an elevated French village, had its communication with the outside world, French or Spanish, by the high-level route until the eighteenth century. It was a pla commune. Frequently communes on opposite versants had closer commercial and social relations with each other than with the plains to which they belong nationally if not linguis-

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