Cirque de Gavarnie
— — the colosseum the glaciers left behind.
Not only on a wall.
“A wall of limestone the shape of a half-moon, three kilometres across at the rim and 1,500 metres tall above the meadow floor. The village of Gavarnie sits below; the walk in takes about an hour, a wide path along the Gave de Pau. From the meadow at the base, the wall does the thing walls aren't supposed to do: it curves around you. Victor Hugo called it Nature's Colosseum. The waterfall down the back face is fed by snow on the Spanish side; in late summer it threads down four hundred metres of stone. Nobody walks away quiet for the wrong reason.
Cirque de Gavarnie, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
The Cirque de Gavarnie is a glacial amphitheatre in the Hautes-Pyrénées department of southwestern France, set against the Spanish border inside the Pyrénées National Park. The arc of limestone walls measures roughly three kilometres across at the rim and rises about 1,500 metres above the meadow floor. The village of Gavarnie, at 1,375 metres, sits at the entrance to the valley; a wide, mostly level footpath of about 4.5 kilometres each way follows the Gave de Pau upstream to the foot of the wall. The cirque was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1997 as part of the cross-border Pyrénées – Mont Perdu property, a mixed natural and cultural site shared between France and Spain.
The wall is layered limestone, raised in the slow collision of Iberia and Europe and carved into its half-moon by Pleistocene glaciation. Three named peaks form the high rim: Pic du Marboré at 3,248 metres, the Casque du Marboré, and the Tour du Marboré. To the west, a narrow notch in the ridge (the Brèche de Roland, at 2,807 metres) was, by the medieval song, cut by the dying knight's sword Durendal. Geologists prefer glacial action and karst weathering. The Grande Cascade, one of the tallest waterfalls in mainland Europe at roughly 422 metres, drops from a karst spring fed by snowmelt on the Spanish slope of Monte Perdido.
The walk in starts from the village of Gavarnie and follows the Gave de Pau upstream for about 4.5 kilometres each way, climbing roughly 300 metres on a wide, mostly even track. Allow two to three hours round-trip without the side-trail to the waterfall base. The path is open from late spring through autumn; snow blocks the upper sections from November into May. The Hôtellerie du Cirque, at the foot of the wall, has served meals to walkers since the nineteenth century. The Pyrénées National Park, founded in 1967, asks visitors to keep dogs leashed and to camp only above 1,800 metres.