However, the hiking trail was snowed under when I jumped off the bus. Without snowshoes or cross-country skis, I took the 2km-long tarmacked road instead. Churches rise high above every village in Val d’Aran, and there was one standing tall at the entrance to Bagergue. Constructed in a local Romanesque style that was popular in the Middle Ages, Val d’Aran’s churches were built not only as places of worship, but as castles, watchtowers and fortifications designed to guard the frontier.
Bagergue is home to the highest–altitude cheese shop in Catalonia, where local producers have revived a traditional mountain recipe that’s regained its popularity throughout Val d’Aran; while testament to the weather and the alpine-esque culture, the villages I’d walked past to reach Bagergue – Salardu and Unha – had a museum dedicated to Pyrenean exploration and a museum solely dedicated to snow.
Morell said that as much as 92% of the valley’s economy relies on tourism: hiking, mountain biking and rafting in the summer; and snow sports in the winter. Despite its official status and legal protections, Sans Socasau had mentioned that increasing tourism and immigration in Val d’Aran was resulting in Aranese being slowly being pushed out by larger languages like Spanish.
“Not enough people speak Aranese,” Sans Socasau said. “Only around 20% of people in Val d’Aran speak the language regularly, at home. The language is in danger, and in 20 or 30 years, it might not even exist.”
Del Valle sees things differently. Even if she speaks Spanish or Catalan as a way to communicate with tourists or newcomers, she also speaks Aranese at work, and she knows the second generation of migrant families settling in Val d’Aran all learn and are taught in Aranese at school. Indeed, the government estimates that around 80% of people who live in the valley understand Aranese, even if they don’t always speak it.
“If you talk to the president of the Aranese language society,” del Valle told me, “he will say that Aranese is about to die. But Aranese is an official language in all of Catalonia. That gives our language some power, and even though we might speak Catalan or Spanish in the valley to understand each other, I don’t think Aranese is in danger, at least not anytime soon.”
Places That Don’t Belong is a BBC Travel series that delves into the playful side of geography, taking you through the history and identity of geo-political anomalies and places along the way.
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