The Pyrenees, written down while the old ways lasted

The full Spanish title states the book’s purpose: the life, ways, customs, beliefs and traditions of a thousand-year-old culture that is disappearing. Ramón Violant y Simorra set out to record how people in the Spanish Pyrenees lived and worked, what they believed and what they did together, because he saw social change wearing those ways of life away. The book was published in 1949.

What he gathered makes it a large resource for the region’s cultural history and for the study of everyday material life, the things ordinary people made and used. It also shows a habit of mind of the mid-twentieth century: the urge to set down customs that were thought to be vanishing under modernisation.

This copy was published in Madrid by Editorial Plus-Ultra. The publisher’s green binding looks sound, and the dust jacket survives, torn and worn around the spine and corners. The pages photographed look clean; the book has not been collated in full.