Beauties of Alto Aragón. Lucien Briet

April 2025

In Torla, at the entrance to the Ordesa valley, an inscription reads:

"To Luciano Briet who died on August 4, 1921, a tribute of gratitude and admiration to the singer of the Ordesa Valley. August 15, 1922"

Chaotic and adventurous, he was a man with many facets. He graduated in Literature, published a collection of poems, ‘The flower of my garden’, with little success, wrote something about history and cultivated other passions: speleology, photography – from his travels in Aragon he left 900 plates out of a total of 1600 – and exploration.

He was cultured, very cultured, and curious.

Lucien Henry Briet was born in 1860 in a Paris in the midst of a transformation in which the empire of Napoleon III promoted the Hausmann project that turned an unhealthy and medieval city into a town of grand boulevards, green spaces, urban furniture, sewage and water supply networks, public facilities and monuments.

A nonconformist, motherless and on bad terms with his father, he is educated by a rich aunt, who allows him to study and live well. He deserted his military service and fled to Belgium. Back in France, a court martial condemns him to the Foreign Legion with which he has to travel to North Africa. Without financial problems, he made an attempt to write poetry, and later devoted himself to photography and travel.

At the end of the nineteenth century, many tourists and explorers travelled to the French Pyrenees where they enjoyed the thermal establishments and the beginnings of mountaineering.

In 1889, Briet made a trip to the Pyrenees and became enthusiastic about the landscapes he discovered. Between 1890 and 1902 he continued to visit the northern area but he soon realised that he had arrived too late to the scene of Pyreneism where most of the peaks had already been explored and described. Even so, he leaves some good accounts about the French slope.

Then he became interested in Spain, still considered a land of adventure. He is the first to dare to explore Alto Aragón. He discovers a region as close as unknown and fall in love of  that land.

From 1903 to 1911, he crossed the border to enter Huesca. It's a 27-hour train ride. He is accompanied by a guide and carries two mules loaded with equipment, a change of clothes, blankets, various documents, a huge camera, his tripod and fourteen dozen 18 x 24 glass plates and systematically explores the area.

His expeditions range from thirty to seventy days, he carefully writes everything he sees, makes barometric observations and photographs villages, places, people, mountains and canyons. He stays in the houses of the village and develops many relationships with the locals.

From 1904 onwards he turned to Aragonese guides who became his friends: Ramón Viu, from Torla, Lorenzo Viu, from Boltaña, and Joaquín Buisán, from Lavelilla.

He goes through the Ordesa Valley and Monte Perdido, the regions of Sobrarbe and Somontano de Barbastro and discovers the Sierra de Guara, the ravines of Vero and Mascún.

Taking note after note, cliché after cliché, he produces a colossal body of work because, back home, in Charly sur Marne, he organizes his notes, develops the photographs and writes a multitude of chronicles that specialized magazines and illustrated newspapers publish in their columns. He gives lectures in France disseminating the beauties of Alto Aragón.

In 1905, he published "Journey to the Barranco de Mascún", pioneering work for the development of canyoning in Guara, where he describes the spectacularity and charm of the area, arousing the interest of other travelers in it.

In 1908 he was received with honours in Boltaña. The Diario del Alto Aragón had published excerpts from "Along the Ara River" and he began to be considered a special "Aragonese". Don Luciano, they call him.

In 1909 the Royal Geographical Society commissioned him to write a monograph on the Ordesa Valley, which he produced between 1909 and 1911. The work was fundamental for the creation of the Ordesa National Park in 1918. It is the second national park declared in Spain after Covadonga.

 It is his last trip. His Spanish friends promise him that his writings will be published.

Indeed, in 1913 the Diputación of Huesca published "Beauties of Alto Aragón" which contains Briet's articles previously published in the Bulletin of the Royal Geographical Society translated into Spanish. The book has been republished in 1977, and in 2 vols. in 1988 and 2003 by the same Diputación.

Briet spends his last ten years in the midst of his manuscripts and his exceptional collection of photographs. Ill since 1920, he died in 1921 at the age of 61 in absolute ruin. He dies without knowing the success of his Spanish dream.

His furniture and library are auctioned and dispersed. Miraculously, Louis Le Bondidier, founder of the Pyrenean Museum of Lourdes, manages to save his manuscripts, diaries, photographic albums and glass plates, already in the hands of a rag picker. There are 1,600 photographs, of which 900 are from Alto Aragón, material that, together with its manuscripts, are preserved in the museum.

Almost none of the French specialized magazines mention his death.

In 1922, in Torla, his Aragonese friends, thanks to a subscription, erected a small monument in his memory at the entrance to the Ordesa valley.

"To Luciano Briet who died on August 4, 1921, a tribute of gratitude and admiration to the singer of the Ordesa Valley. August 15, 1922"

The mountain refuge of Ordesa, a promenade in Torla, a street in Barbastro and a Spanish-French school in Zaragoza are named after him.

In Boltaña, the region of Sobrarbe has been organizing the Lucien Briet Photographic Contest for 32 years

In the town of Alquezar, a statue is erected in his honour, remembering his contribution to the discovery and promotion of this land.

Nonconformist, chaotic and adventurous, Briet did not obtain recognition for his work in life. But his trace has endured. The Ordesa National Park and the projection of the Sierra de Guara as a privileged enclave for canyoning, hiking and climbing are heirs of his work.

And in our country, he is paid tribute as one of the great pioneers of the exploration of the Aragonese Pyrenees.

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