I discovered the Val d'Azun for the first time in 1980. It was in the spring.

It was a real shock.
Coming out of the village of Arras en Lavedan, I was truly struck, confounded, by the beauty and harmony of the landscape before me.

At the exit of the village, the valley opens wide, on gently sloping meadows, soft green, some hedges of a more sustained green emphasizing the characteristic glacial form; further on, at the crossroads of secondary valleys, pretty villages with slate roofs and snow-capped peaks in the background! But what heights! Proud, slender, superb, giving the whole an incomparable strength and majesty.

A landscape that is both simple and magnificent, soft and majestic, a sort of culmination of Nature, of plenitude, of perfect harmony, in which one feels an irresistible desire to blend.

I thought, however, despite my 25 years, to have toured what the Pyrenees offer of beauty, sumptuousness and diversity. What I had in front of me was more than all that. Not grandiose, as Gavarnie or Ordesa can be, nor “extra-ordinary”, as certain Pyrenean landscapes are, but quite simply beautiful and harmonious, like an accomplishment, a finished work.

I had come for professional reasons, for a few months.

Forty years have passed, I stayed.

Behind the landscape, I gradually discovered a multi-faceted valley, largely up to the beautiful initial promise, and inhabitants with smiling hearts, welcoming and open, just like the valley.

The Val d'Azun naturally served as a framework for my profession, perhaps even, in fact, was it at the origin?

In any case, from my window, not a day goes by that I don't feel deep inside me what I felt that first day, this feeling of being gripped in the guts, happily bewitched by the Val of Azun.

In front of me, the Gabizos, quiet, accomplice, seems to watch over the Azunois.

Vincent Fonvieille