Savage Frontier

With the Catalonia crisis making international headlines, the unique cultural and geographic region bordering Spain and France has once again moved to the centre of the world’s attention. In Savage Frontier, acclaimed author and journalist Matthew Carr uncovers the fascinating, multi-layered story of the Pyrenees region--both a forbidding, mountainous frontier zone of stunning beauty, home to a unique culture, and a site of sharp conflict between nations and empires. Carr traces the routes over the mountains taken by monks, soldiers, poets, pilgrims and refugees, to examine the lives and events that have shaped the Pyrenees across the centuries. His cast of characters includes Napoleon, Hannibal and Charlemagne; the eccentric British climber Lord Henry Russell; Francisco Sabater Llopart, the Catalan anarchist who waged a lone war across the Pyrenees against Franco for years after the Civil War; and the cellist Pablo Casals, who spent more than twenty-three years in exile only a few miles from the Spanish border, to show his disgust and disapproval of the regime. Savage Frontier shines a new light on one of the most haunting, magical and dramatic landscapes on Earth.