A fountain, a pilgrim, a name
The name Font-Romeu comes from Catalan and literally means ‘pilgrim's fountain.’ Local legend has it that a shepherd discovered a statue of the Virgin near a spring in the 17th century, on the site of today's Ermitage Notre-Dame de Font-Romeu. A pilgrimage chapel was built there, with a Baroque altarpiece and a twisted-column cloister that both survive today, and the pilgrimage that followed gave its name to the village that grew up around it.
II. Sport & innovationFrom the height of technology to Olympic altitude
In 1970, the CNRS commissioned the world's largest solar furnace at Odeillo, a materials-research facility made up of 63 heliostats directing light onto a 40-metre-tall parabolic mirror. Still operational, it remains a technical feat visible for miles around and open to visitors.
Two years earlier, the 1968 Mexico City Olympics had exposed how much altitude affects athletic performance. France responded by creating the National Altitude Training Centre in Font-Romeu, at 1,850 metres, which has since trained generations of Olympic athletes, from track and field to Nordic skiing, drawing on the same plateau's exceptional sunshine, summer and winter alike.
From the sunny plateau to the Carlit peaks
The Odeillo solar furnace and the Ermitage Notre-Dame can both be visited in half a day, a few kilometres apart. To gain height in the literal sense, Bolquère-Eyne station, the highest in France at 1,592 m, puts you on the Train Jaune toward the rest of the Cerdagne.
Come summer, Lac des Bouillouses, about twenty kilometres away, opens onto the trails of the Carlit massif, while winter brings back downhill skiers and Nordic skiing enthusiasts to the Pyrénées 2000 resort, two seasons for the same plateau that never runs short of sunshine.