Quatre-Vallées

The Aure, Barousse, and Neste valleys are all located in the Pyrenees mountains, in the southeast of the present-day département of Hautes-Pyrénées.

In June 1300, Count Bernard of Labarthe granted the 53 articles of the "Statutes, Customs, and Privileges of the Country of Quatre-Vallées".

Taking advantage of her weakness, Gaston de Lyon, Lord of Bezaudun and seneschal of Toulouse, lured the poor Isabelle into selling him the Quatre-Vallées against 5,127 gold crowns (écus d'or), which he never paid, always postponing payment in the hope of a rapid death of Isabelle.

Gaston de Lyon then sent his private doctor to Isabelle, and this one saw to it that she would not live long enough to embarrass his master.

In August 1476, the paralyzed and forlorn Isabelle of Armagnac, who in her youth had been promised to the king of England, died in horrible pain after drinking a potion prepared by the doctor to "cure" her.

Nonetheless, Quatre-Vallées kept all its privileges granted in the Middle Ages, and it also kept its provincial states until the French Revolution, which decided freely what was the level of taxation and how much was given to the king.

The provincial states of Quatre-Vallées, made up of only ten members, met once a year in an inn at Garaison, a famous pilgrimage center where the Virgin Mary was said to have appeared in the beginning of the 16th century.

They had been freed and exempted from feudal taxes and corvées for centuries already, and so they did not demand equality and the end of privileges like the other parts of France did.

At first it was planned that Quatre-Vallées would gather with the provinces of Nébouzan and Comminges, and that the three would elect common representatives to the Estates-General in Versailles.

The people of Quatre-Vallées objected bitterly, stressing the old historical and economic ties with Comminges, but it was to no avail.

After that, the people of the Quatre-Vallées returned to their isolated and self-supporting lifestyle, away from the new trends and political changes that France experienced in the 19th century.

Today, the low population density of the Quatre-Vallées have turned them into a haven for nature lovers and people wishing to discover some of the wildest parts of the Pyrenees, where a spectacular landscape is combined with a rich historical heritage and many old monuments.