The Pyrenees is one of the great European landscapes.
It cuts across the mouth of the Iberian peninsula, forming the border between France and Spain.
It’s been a place of beauty and of terror; a passage for refugees, dissidents and resistance fighters; and the cradle of both religious heresy and religious pilgrimage.
This fascinating region is too often overshadowed by the romance of the Alps. But as you’ll hear in today’s podcast, it has its own very different set of stories to tell.
I’m joined by Matthew Carr, author of Savage Frontier: The Pyrenees in History, Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain and Sherman’s Ghosts. He’s also written for a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Observer and The Guardian.
You can follow his writing on Substack and Twitter.
We spoke about medieval troubadours, Cathar castles, and Second World War escape routes from Nazi occupied Europe.
These are the books we mentioned in the podcast:
- Savage Frontier: The Pyrenees in History
- The Devils of Cardona
- Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent
We also mentioned:
- The Song of Roland
- The Avignon Quintet by Lawrence Durrell
You can listen to Personal Landscapes: Conversations on Books About Place on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, Podbean, Google Podcasts, Audible, PlayerFM, and TuneIn + Alexa.
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