Desecrating Europe’s most beautiful mountains in the name of sport
Do you ski? And do you sign petitions against wind turbines too? Yes? Then how dare you? How dare anyone who claims to care about mountain landscapes object to a row of graceful white blades turning slowly on the skyline, then jet off to enjoy the wreckage of whole mountainsides — fauna destroyed, rocks, trees and shrubs bulldozed away and replaced with thousands of iron poles and airport-terminal-style ski-centres and bars — for rich people’s holiday pleasure during the few months when snow covers the spring, summer and autumn scars?
I have just had a shock. Walking in the High Pyrenees in Aragon, and following one of the great and ancient walking-routes, the GR11, I crested a lovely ridge — and came upon a kind of hell. They are creating a ski complex in the Valle de Tena. What must be at least ten square miles of mountainside sweeping up from the river towards the peaks is being scraped clean of everything — even grass — to make ski-safe slopes. The grass may grow again in time, but all the trees are gone now, and the rocks where the meerkat-like marmots shriek and play have been carted away. The mountain is being reforested with the steel of ski-lift poles.
I had no idea the infrastructure of this sport made such a mess of mountain scenery, and I wonder whether most skiers do. They see the landscape beneath a blanket of snow. They see the cafeterias and equipment-hire centres as oases of warmth and fun amid the freezing wastes. They see the ski-lifts and cable cars as transports of delight. They do not hear the cow-bells of the Pyrenean summer, the marmots’ call or the larks’ song.
They should come back in August and look at what their sport has done. The mountains are bare, the sprawling hire and refreshment complexes shut, the miles of snaking tarmac and concrete access roads empty and dusty. The cable cars do not move and bits of machinery lie around.
I must acknowledge that what the regional government and tourist industry in Aragon is doing is unusually crude, on an unusually wholesale scale, and probably a commercial misjudgment. A process of ski-ification which normally creeps almost unnoticed upon a landscape over decades is being concentrated into a few years at the snap of the bureaucrats’, politicians’ and businessmen’s fingers. But the starkness and suddenness of the desolation bring the brutality home.
It is not just the immediate infrastructure and scraping of the slopes, ugly those these are. In Aragon I saw huge sheds under construction at the bottom of the valley for the snow-making machines (this valley is between 1,600 and 1,900 metres, and too low-lying for reliable snow coverage, and I saw a billboard promising that here there will be snow even when there is no snow naturally). Then there is the housing of the skiers and their attendant seasonal workforce. For this a whole new town is being built at Formigal. Monstrous yellow cranes are swinging, concrete-mixers roaring, trucks belting back and forth, as a science-fiction-meets-The-Sound-ofMusic ski-city rises from the juniper and box. Ghastly six-storey condominiums in faux-chalet design with Swiss-style roofs and forests of mini-balconies jostle together in a ‘ski-village’ which will be a ghostly, empty place for eight months of the year. How services like sewage treatment will cope when the peak of demand coincides with the lowest of external temperatures, I have no idea — and rather suspect the developers have none either. Already there is foul water gushing from this construction site into the river below.
I have almost never wanted a brave commercial adventure to fail; and in Aragon, which for decades has been suffering from chronic and debilitating rural depopulation and needs investment and jobs badly, one can understand this near-panicky bid for tourist euros; but if it does work, whom will it benefit? Seasonal work will attract migratory labour; meanwhile the steady, centuries-old, modest but gently growing business of looking after the ramblers, tourers and family holidaymakers who amble through the Pyrenees in all seasons, staying in little local hotels, alberges and youth hos tels is actually damaged by get-rich-quick ski-ification. Believe me, no walkers like my companion and me will ever again repeat that stretch of the GR11. We encountered a German hiker completely lost amid the skilift poles. His walker’s map had become unrecognisable and all the discreet pathmarkers had been bulldozed away.
Easy, I know, for rich visitors in search of solitude, like me, to advise restraint when people are desperate for local industry, but parts of Europe like the Pyrenees should keep their nerve. The future lies in smallscale, high-quality, individualistic tourist development. Local prosperity will in the end depend on unspoiled views, and on villages and towns that have kept their character. A well-maintained footpath, a wellrun mountain hostel, a new refuge, a small hotel or a pleasant restaurant may individually make a minuscule contribution to a local economy, but cumulatively they make a solid and healthy foundation to a sustainable sort of tourism which will grow.
Those who go for quick-fix development in the ‘new’ and ‘developing’ Europe should look at what short-termism did to the Catalan Costa Brava: a long, delicate and beautiful coastline was ruined by the construction industry and the package-holiday business. This brought a lot of money and work for about 30 years; but now European tourism has moved on; cheapo holidays in concrete boxes are going out of fashion; the Costa Brava is running down; and it has wrecked beyond recovery what could have been its best and most enduring resource.
At our peril we overlook an apparent paradox. Big vistas, wide skies, generous landscapes are the least forgiving of development. You can tip millions of houses, thousands of miles of roads and a great many shopping centres into the tight little hills and valleys of Surrey, Hampshire or Bucks, and it still looks pretty. Everything sinks beneath the greenery. But one track across a desert, one row of chalets on a wide beach, or one ski-lift across a Pyrenean skyline can wreck a whole landscape. A birch-clad dingle-dale can swallow a Mecca bingo hall, two multistorey car parks and three Barratt residential developments. A whole mountain range can choke on a single pole.
Matthew Parris is a political columnist of the Times.
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