The weather is softening, the snow is melting and the days are getting longer. The time has come to plan new Pyrenees-trips along the bordermarkers. Who are the main players in the heroïc field of finding all esfr-markers? A list of the current 9 men/women who did them all, can be found on this page. […]
Today I swam to bm602, the last of the esfr-bordermarkers in a cave on the Mediterranean coast. Accessible only by boat or by swimming. I trained this summer in open water swimming and after a failed trial a few days ago, I succeeded today in good weather and a calm sea. And thanks to the […]
Carlos and Conchita Roca (website) are proceeding steadily on their quest to do all esfr-bordermarkers. They started in the eastern Pyrenees years ago; the only marker missing there was bm602. But yesterday bm602 was finally conquered: see their own story. Bm602 is a special one: in a cave along the Mediterranean coast, it is only […]
This marker is relatively young. It was placed in 1997 after a Spanish engineer had discovered that the borderline between bm420 and 421 was presented wrongly on the maps and didn’t follow the real watershed. See this page for the whole story. At my first visit in 2011, bm420bis was still in perfect health after […]
I’m pleased to announce a new update of my website on the bordermarkers of the Pyrenees. See for the update details: http://www.grpdesbf.nl/esfr-html-miscellania-updatelog.html Gradually I am approaching the end of my project to visit en document all esfr-bordermarkers. And to design a coast-to-coast hiking trail that connects the bordermarkers: the GRPdesBF. I have visited almost every […]
The esfr-bordermarkers in the Basque country are not safe. Recently the markers 76 and 100 have disappeared and no. 101 has been broken off: For Basque nationalists, the esfr-border should be non-existent, cutting in half a region that should be an independent whole. There is an iconic picture of the ‘execution’ of bm098 in which […]
Pleased to announce a new update of my main site, covering the 11 day trips I did in September 2021. See for the details this page. A lot of information and pictures, it might be a bit too much. If I may suggest two picks: – 6 September: my longest day trip ever in terms […]
In the previous post, I introduced Sébastien Marc and his cousin Jérôme Loubière, the new kids on the block. Sébastien surprised me a bit later with an excel-sheet of how he keeps track of the bordermarkers he has covered so far. Hereunder a picture of his sheet: (You can download this sheet (his current status) […]
I used to receive once in a while pictures of esfr-bordermarkers of Sébastian Marc and I wondered who he was and if he aimed at ‘doing’ all the esfr-bordermarkers. To my surprise, he happened to be not a retired sexagenarian or septuagenarian but a young and athletic man with a passion to find and photograph […]
Saturday 11 September 2021: a very special day for Corinne Gourgeonnet. After 6 years, she completed her quest to find and photograph each and every bordermarker along the French-Spanish border. The last one to do was well chosen: bm311 at Col de Sobe. A touristic train brought her to Lac d’Artouste which left 2 hours […]