Day 53, Sunday 6/5:

Today we left Loubens to travel across the border into Spain. As we climbed into the French Pyrenees, we stopped at the town of Tarascon-sur-Ariège for a coffee. The town was in the midst of market fever, with yesterday being the dog festival, today was the plant festival with many plants for sale in the main square, accompanied by a lively old gent dancing and spinning around while playing his piano accordion.

We pushed on to Llivia, a town on a little piece of Spanish land (~13km²), landlocked from the greater Spanish territory by France, only a few kilometers from the border. This occurred when, under the 1659 Treaty of the Pyrenees, Spain ceded 33 villages to France, but as Llivia was a town, it remained Spanish territory. The tiny nucleus of the old town is hard to spot, as it is surrounded by new developments, with only the church spire to give it away. A lovely old town it was too. We were able to go inside the church, which is unusual in that is has no large windows. We speculated that it was probably used as a fortress at some point in history. We ate our lunch before continuing on into greater Spain, to Tremp. When we arrived in this town we found that it too was in the midst of carnival fever, with many streets cordoned off with children’s rides, arts and crafts, agricultural machinery and cars on display. We wandered around and stopped at several bars for tapas. Later that evening we had a pretty average dinner at the hotel. I had fried kid while Patsy and Philip had ‘veal’.