Last month I went hiking in the Pyrénées-Orientales, the Eastern part of the range, where I walked for almost 100 miles in 8 days, in stunning scenery and pleasant solitude. Some sections of the GR10 were a little more crowded than others, but I found that the trail was overall well preserved: the French Hiking Federation does quite a good job keeping the trail clear without causing too much erosion or making its presence too obvious.

I ended my hike in the town of Amélie-Les-Bains, a town known for its sulfur springs, in which people suffering from rheumatism bathe. Since I had a day to kill and don’t have any particular ailments that would have justified visiting the baths, I decided to walk to the nearby town of Arles-sur-Tech, where I was told one could visit the famous Gorges de la Fou – a stunning canyon, with impressive rock formations and incredible plant diversity.

The canyon is described as “the narrowest in Europe” (it is only about 2 1/2 feet wide in the narrowest sections), and seems to have acquired international fame for its beauty. A stream has carved through the rock, in some places as deep as 450 feet, a series of caves and waterfalls, and the rocks on both sides are covered with a wide variety of plants. It was definitely something to look foward to.

The parking lot and entrance area, with its souvenir shops and plumes of barbecue smoke, should have warned me that this was not going to be as natural a site as what I had been seeing over the week prior. Indeed, the site turned out to be what man does worst, in what nature does best. In this unique natural setting, which took tens of thousands of years to be created, all there is to see now is metal. A walkway, which is affixed to the rock face with I-beams and concrete, takes the entire width of the canyon, so that you cannot see the stream beneath. Meanwhile, overhead, a metal mesh protecting visitors from falling rocks runs the entire length of the canyon.

As a result, you feel confined in a sort of metal cage, where you can see neither the water not the sky unobstructed.

As I was progressing on the mile-long walkway, I was getting increasingly frustrated. All you can hear is the clanking of running children’s feet on the metal walkway; where the gorge widens, there is a platform with a bench and a rest area. The entire site was denatured, there was nothing left to see – what once was a beautiful natural site is now… well, nothing. Making it available to everyone eliminated the attractiveness of the site, and ruined it for all.

I think it is wonderful to make natural sites available to many visitors, but within reason. In a place where visitors will be awestruck, there is immense potential to teach something about the environment, about the ecology of the site, and to give people a chance to leave with a little more than bad photos: a bit of knowledge and sensitivity about nature. But making it available should not be done at the cost of the site itself. Some places are meant to remain natural. Not every mountaintop or beach has to have a expressway reaching it. The mere act of bringing the site to visitors takes away from the value of it. And people should accept with humility that there are some places they cannot reach because access is to difficult. And it’s ok.

Ultimately, I didn’t pay to see a canyon; I paid to walk on a metal walkway in a canyon (as a side note, I would be curious to know what the profits generated by the exploitation of this natural site go to – I doubt that they go toward natural preservation projects). The people who devised, built, and operate this walkway should be ashamed of themselves. By bringing it to the masses, they destroyed this gorge and ruined it entirely: there is nothing left to see there.

In their defense, the flora was breathtaking.

I only wish the opportunity was taken to educate about it, to learn how to identify the various plants and how they survive in such an environment. Too bad.