Cirque de Gavarnie

The amphitheatre of rock rises in a single sweeping wall, snow and ice clinging to the rim and a waterfall dropping more than four hundred metres through the mist into the silence below. The Cirque de Gavarnie is the French Pyrenees at their most dramatic — a geological theatre built by ice and time, with a front row open to anyone willing to walk a couple of hours from the village.

The cirque is a glacial bowl heading the Gavarnie valley, a World Heritage site inside the Pyrenees National Park where the bands of limestone strata run round the walls under the permanent snow of the rim, and the Grande Cascade pours over it — the tallest waterfall in France. Victor Hugo, who came in 1843, called it the Colosseum of nature, and the scale only registers when you see walkers as specks at the foot of the wall. The village of Gavarnie is reachable all year by road; from it a valley trail leads gently in, the cirque revealing itself around successive bends, and the final stretch to the foot of the waterfall is steeper and stony. Marmots whistle from the slopes in summer. Above, the Brèche de Roland — the notch in the ridge with a legend for every century — is the pass into Spain for serious walkers.