Description

Join Julie Conover and Mark Jennings on a mountain bike ride on the French Pyrenees mountain slopes and learn about the history of the area.

Transcript

Go Mountain Biking on the Pyrenees Slopes in France Julie Conover: The Pyrenees Mountains are filled with Ski slopes and in the summer time they’re used for mountain biking. Mark Jennings: You can take your peak from a rugged technical design to a high speed cruise down the main runs. The share ride to the top allows you to soak up used of the Pastoral Country Side. Julie Conover: Hikers too come to enjoy these beautiful natural landscape and as we rubble our way down the mountain we enjoyed used of valley below and the distant picks of Andorra. Mark Jennings: During the middle ages life in the Pyrenees was centered on the small self-sustaining agricultural villages with the exception of shepherds tending their gracing flocks, people rarely wondered far from their homes. Julie Conover: The population of the mountain villages began as a trickle in the mid 1600 and picked in the decades after World War II. In the years after the Nazi occupation of France a complex underground network successfully smuggled 35000 refugees over the Pyrenees and into neutral Spain. In retaliation for their role in aiding their resistance the Nazi’s destroyed made villages throughout the Pyrenees. After the war the economy began to recover, farming moved from these deep hillsides down to the lowlands where machines took over the jobs of man causing an increase demand for water and power. As a result rivers were damped, mountain pastures flooded and villages like this one were abandoned.