Val d’Aran, also called Vath d’Aran, meaning ‘Aran Valley’, is a parçan (territorial division in the Occitan nation, equivalent to the Catalan comarca) situated in south-east Gascony in Occitània, and politically in the north-west of Catalonia.
[Val d’Aran’s location in Catalonia]
Its own and official language is Aranese, a dialect of Occitan. It’s a co-official language together with Catalan and Spanish.
It has a population of 10.295 people (according to the 2009 census), an area of 633,60 km², and its capital city is Vielha. Its anthem is Montanhes Araneses, a lightly modified version of the traditional Occitan song Se canta.
The Aranese national day is Hèsta d’Aran, celebrated annually on the 17th of June.
The first inhabitants in Aran lived during the Bronze Age, and left many funerary jaciments.
In the 3rd century bC, the Greek historian Polybius wrote about the existance of a tribe called Arenosi who lived in Aran, but the origin of the word that we use nowadays comes from the 1st century bC. Then, the Roman emperror Pompey annexed the whole Garona Valley to the Roman Empire. It was around that moment when the local language, of Basque origin, got mixed with Latin and resulted in the Aranese that has evolved to the one spoken nowadays.
The word Aran comes from the Basque language, and means ‘valley’.
After the fall of Charlemagne’s empire, the valley was Christianised. Val d’Aran is rich in churches from many time periods and styles, but is especially famous for its Romanesque churches.
After centuries of defeating the foreign invasions, on the 14th century the French and Catalano-Aragonese nobles fought to govern the valley with their feudalist system. The Aranese voluntarily decided to side with the Catalano-Aragonese Crown, since they respected the Aran’s own system of government. So feudalism never became part of Aran, such as other languages (nor French nor Catalan, nor later Spanish) never became majoritary.
[Romanesque church in Aran]
A hundred years after the Spanish invasion of Catalonia, Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion in 1810 took it for the French. In 1815, the French king Louis XVII gave it back to Spain, who abolished all the privileges that Aran had maintained during the centuries.
The dictatorships of the 20th century tried to completely eliminate all the languages and cultures that were not Spanish, including Aranese. But the Aranese people did not forget their history nor the fight for their rights.
With the death of dictator Franco and the arrival of democracy in the year 1975, the Aranese reivindicated their rights and in the year 1979 the Val d’Aran was recognised as an area with differences.
It wasn’t until 1990 that the Aranese administrative system was restored, via universal suffrage.
[Traditional dances for Sant Joan]
