Cauterets – Grand England Hotel and the Boulevard

You’re probably not familiar with Cauterets. It’s a small town in the Hautes-Pyrénées department of France, most famous for its ski resort. I used to go there from time to time as a child. I don’t remember much about it other than the fact that to get to the slopes from the town, you had to ride a cable car that was almost four kilometers long (the longest in France) and which terrified me (I have a fear of heights and my phobia of cable cars probably comes from riding this one twice a day for a week back then).

However, at the beginning of the 19th century, skiing didn’t yet really exist as a sport, and Cauterets had been famous for years (or even centuries?) as a spa resort that would have welcomed the biggest names in the 19th century when thermalism was a popular activity.

The hotel was built in 1879 and the building still exists, although it now houses apartments. It is listed as a historic monument.

Here is the town’s Wikipedia page if you want to know more about it.

I have several postcards showing Cauterets, which seems to have been a frequent destination for my grandfather and the rest of his family.

You’ll see the other ones sooner or later.

The postcard is unfortunately damaged, so there’s not much to take away from the text other than that it was written by Raoul, a cousin of my grandfather, whose postcards are all written from the Pyrénées if I remember correctly (Cauterets but also the Ariège department).

An interesting sentence is the one written upside down at the top of the card:

“The chamois is healthy and is getting tame.”

Could he have captured a Pyrenean chamois and tried to make a pet of it?

It seems so.

As far as I know, I have never heard about a tamed chamois so he probably didn’t succeed in the end.