New Mountain Book: 'The Pyrenees' by Colin Duncan Taylor

Colin Duncan Taylor’s new book The Pyrenees: A Human History (Yale) is available for preorder in the UK (Aug 25) and in the USA (Sept 8). The book’s subtitle evokes another mountain book, Ed Douglas’s Himalaya: A Human History and seems to to approach the mountains similarly.

The author has lived in the Pyrenees for the past 25 years and documents his travels (and his writing) on his website.

Yale University Press marketing materials say this about the book:

The Pyrenees dominate the landscape between France and Spain, stretching from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Long thought of as an impassable, unspoiled wilderness, the mountains are often seen as both a physical and cultural barrier between western Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. Yet this treacherous terrain has been inhabited and shaped by human hands for centuries.

Colin Duncan Taylor leads us through the human history of the Pyrenees, from the cave art of their first prehistoric inhabitants to today’s spa towns and ski resorts. Early pastoralists, Greek and Roman colonists, the Visigoths, and the Moors all left their mark on the mountains, which have played an outsize role in European history—as a place to live or hide, attack or defend, exploit or enjoy.

Taylor collects stories from both sides of the mountains and reveals how they have been made and remade throughout history by people from all levels of society.

As Michael Kerr reports on his blog Deskbound Traveller, Geographical Magazine recently published an excerpt of The Pyrenees.