Société Ramond

The Société Ramond is a French learned society devoted to the study of the Pyrenees mountain range that forms a natural border between France and Spain.

The society was formed in 1865 (although 1864 is also given as its founding date) in Bagnères-de-Bigorre by Henry Russell (1834–1909), a French-Irish eccentric who made many first ascents in the Pyrenees; Émilien Frossard (1829–1898); and Charles Packe (1826–1896).

[1] Their first meeting, at which Frossard (with his two sons Charles and Emilien-Sigismond), Packe and Russell came up with the idea for a society to be modelled on the recently formed Alpine Club in London (1857), was on 19 August 1864 at l’Hôtel des Voyageurs in Gavarnie.

[2] At this meeting, Russell, a keen mountaineer and along with Packe and Maxwell-Lyte a member of the Alpine Club, argued that all candidates for membership should have climbed at least one Pyrenean peak of three thousand metres or more.

[1] The society started publishing a trimestrial bulletin in the first half of 1866 entitled Explorations pyrénéennes, in which its most eminent members put forth their theories and reported on the fruits of the research.