Loubaresse in Ardèche

A small typical village in Haute-Ardèche at the foot of Tanargue, overlooking the Valgorge valley. In the centre of the village there is a grocery store, a restaurant, and a well-known guesthouse with dining.

Here, mushroom seekers from the towns of Alès, Aubenas, or Largentières stop for lunch, and in the evening the hikers who make the tour of Tanargue, the Ardèche Mountain, or the variant trail of the Cévenol coming from La Bastide-Puylaurent through Saint-Laurent-les-Bains and Borne.

The Cévenol is one of the most beautiful paths in the region; it takes 5 to 7 days.

Nestled at the edge of Tanargue, this mountain village (1,250 m) is the smallest municipality in the department. Its houses of granite and basalt are clustered around the church, whose crenellated bell tower is built with the remains of a watchtower constructed by the lord of Borne.

Its name may come from the wolves that once inhabited the region, or from laoubo recento, meaning "the recent dawn," as the village receives the first rays of the rising sun. Maggy Merle, a local personality, runs the small grocery store and takes readings for Météo-France.

The Valgorge Valley
The origin of the name may come from vallis gurgulionis, a valley that begins at the gorge — a narrow place where the Beaume flows in. Nestled at the foot of the imposing southern face of Tanargue, this secluded spot has attracted many writers.

At the Château de Chastanet, the poet Ovide de Valgorge was born. Albin Mazon (alias Doctor Francus), a great historian of Ardèche, traversed the entire region on muleback. Kenneth White, a British writer, lived there for several years, finding inspiration for his Letters from Gourgounel. Simone de Beauvoir recounts in Histoire Drailles a stay she made in 1935. During World War II, she returned by bicycle with Jean-Paul Sartre to spend a holiday in the free zone.

Taranis was a Celtic god: the god of thunder. It is said that he made his home in the Tanargue massif, this rocky bar in the southwest of Ardèche, where Pierre Veyrenc recounted on 23 June 1867: "...the devil took the Tanargue! The lightning has struck again — it killed 2 shepherds and 203 sheep..."
Nestled at its feet, with 32 inhabitants at the last census and an area of 900 ha, Loubaresse is the smallest village in the department. It is located at 1,250 metres above sea level, at the gateway to the Ardèche mountains, and hesitates between the Mediterranean and oceanic slopes, the Cévennes and the plateau. Backed by the tip of Tanargue, which stops the cloud-bearing winds coming from the southeast, the village receives a great deal of water (2,100 mm on average per year), but does not retain it.

In a few hours, it cascades down to swell the current of the Beaume river, which has its source at Rochemisole at the top of the village. Here, it is customary to say: when the rain makes itself heard in the region, it is in Loubaresse that it is loudest!
We do not have more rainy days than elsewhere, and in summer it is quite dry — but when it rains, it is no joke.

The fir tree. A conifer with persistent needles, the fir tree has a straight trunk with horizontal branches. It possesses, like the Scots pine, medicinal properties. Locally, it is chosen as a pibou to be erected in front of the home of a newly elected official, to celebrate and honour them. As a tall timber tree, it provides good-quality wood that is sought after in carpentry and joinery. It can coexist with another type of conifer: the common spruce.

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Ardèche, so worthy of interest to both the illustrator and the naturalist, contains several little-known parts, although they do not deserve the neglect in which they have remained: such is the domain of Ubas, which occupies a circumference of seven leagues. It is located at the western edge of the department in the canton of Saint-Étienne-de-Lugdarès, 8 leagues northwest of L'Argentière, and surrounded to the north, east, and south by hills that gradually rise, forming the volcanic mountain of Prasoncoupe, whose name means cut crater of the meadows, as it overlooks beautiful meadows, and whose height is about 1,000 metres above the Mediterranean.

This volcano is, on account of the abundance of its lavas, one of the most important in Vivarais. Had the naturalists who travelled through its surroundings visited it, they would not have overlooked Loubaresse. From its slopes flow thermal waters, sources of wealth for the village of Saint-Laurent-les-Bains, which, without the reputation they enjoy, would languish isolated and almost deserted in the bottom of its round valley — narrow, bristling with half-decayed rocks, whose scattered debris offers the image of chaos. From the summit of Prasoncoupe, the scene changes; the aridity of this valley gives way, around the volcano, to the fertile abundance of a land covered with woods, meadows, plentiful waters, and cultivated fields.

From the top of the Loubaresse volcano, one dominates the Valgorge valley — the most picturesque in Vivarais, with its thousands of peaks and needles and its beautiful vegetation, whose arrangement offers an unexpected succession of cheerful or wild scenes at every step. It is at the Château de Valgorge, a village located in the most fertile part of the valley, that the Marquis de La Fare composed the verses that made him famous.

There were once, dominating the high mountains of these cold regions, four towers: those of Loubaresse, Borne, Saint-Laurent-les-Bains, and Luc, at the top of which shone, when the night was dark, fires lit from immense bonfires — luminous beacons that illuminated the surrounding area from afar and served as signals during the feudal wars between lords, which were so disastrous and frequent. Of these four towers, one has already disappeared. Situated 1,242 metres above sea level on the extinct and filled crater of one of the oldest volcanoes in Vivarais, this tower — which produced, seen from afar, such a picturesque and striking effect in the landscape — had been spared by time. But fewer than five years ago came a man who had no fondness for old ruins, who had it torn down and levelled to the ground in order to use the materials for the reconstruction of the parish church of Loubaresse.

From Chambons to Loubaresse, a village composed exclusively of muleteers — robust and hardy mountaineers who have courage and skill, but less of the grace and coquettish elegance of Andalusian muleteers — and from Loubaresse to Chat-del-Bos, where the road leads to Saint-Laurent-les-Bains, now only a league away, every well-trodden path fades away. One is left with only meadows and fields, through which cattle and people wander at random.

A multitude of streams cut through and disrupt the land you traverse. Almost all of them make more noise than their size would suggest. It is also worth noting: in the mountains, streams have wandering and dizzying movements that the peaceful, flower-lined streams of our plains do not offer.