Three days, eleven hundred kilometres, and a 1969 Mercedes 280 SL Pagoda. The route from Biarritz to Andorra that almost no one drives anymore.
There is a particular kind of European road — narrow, beautifully surfaced, almost entirely empty — that exists in only a few hundred places on the continent, and which the major motoring routes have, mercifully, forgotten. The trans-Pyrenean road from Biarritz to Andorra, by way of the smaller cols, is one of these.
We drove it in late October, when the beech forests of the Aspe valley had turned the colour of polished bronze and the higher passes had received their first dusting of snow.
The car
A Mercedes-Benz 280 SL of 1969 vintage — the Pagoda — is not, strictly, a sports car. It is a grand tourer: refined, ample, deceptively quick, and — perhaps most importantly for a three-day mountain expedition — comfortable enough to drive for eight hours without complaint.
Ours was specified in Light Ivory, with a navy soft-top and parchment leather. The 2.8-litre straight-six, fuel-injected, produces 170 horsepower and a curiously musical exhaust note above 4,000 rpm. The automatic transmission — four-speed, refined to the point of self-effacement — is no enemy of spirited driving when the road climbs.
Day one: Biarritz to Pau
We left the coast at first light. The D932 climbs gently inland from Bayonne, threading between fields of late maize, the Pyrenees themselves not yet visible. By the time the road begins to rise — somewhere around Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port — the air has dropped four or five degrees and the leaves of the roadside oaks have begun to turn.
Autumn driving has a quality the other seasons lack. The light is lower, more honest. The horizon clarifies. And the road, free of summer traffic, returns to something close to its original character.
The Col d'Aubisque, climbed by the D918 from Laruns, is one of the great Tour de France ascents — but in late October it is almost entirely deserted. We had the road, in both directions, for the better part of an hour. The Pagoda's engine, lean on the climbs, sang clean through every gear; the brakes, on the descent, never complained.
Pau by sunset. A glass of Jurançon at the Hôtel de France, with the Pyrenees turning indigo in the last of the light.
Day two: Pau to Foix
Inland now. The road climbs harder. The Col du Tourmalet — at 2,115 metres the highest paved road in the central Pyrenees — was closed for the season, so we routed south through Lourdes and east via the smaller D618. This is country the motoring press never visits: high, austere, sparsely populated, very beautiful.
A late lunch at Saint-Lary-Soulan. The proprietor, who had once owned a Pagoda himself in the mid-seventies, came out to inspect the engine bay and pronounced it "plus propre que la mienne ne l'a jamais été." Cleaner than mine ever was.
The afternoon climb over the Col du Portet d'Aspet is one of the great forgotten drives of Europe. The road surface, recently renewed, is impeccable. The forest closes overhead; light flickers between trunks; the engine note ricochets off the limestone. There were perhaps three other cars in the eighty-kilometre run.
Foix by dusk. A medieval castle, lit by floodlights, watching the road in.
Day three: Foix to Andorra
The final day is shorter — perhaps three hundred kilometres — but the most demanding. The Pas de la Casa, the high border pass into Andorra at 2,408 metres, requires concentration: the air thins, the engine notices, the gradient bites.
We crested the pass at half past two on a Tuesday afternoon in a temperature of three degrees Celsius. The Mercedes — its soft-top still down, parchment leather warmed by an autumn sun working hard — held a steady third gear through the final hairpins. A Spanish customs officer at the border, leaning against his hut, raised a hand as we passed and did not check the documents.
A cigarette, perhaps. A nod to the colour of the bonnet. Nothing said.
The point
Eleven hundred kilometres in three days. No motorways. No tolls. No traffic of any consequence. Three nights in three different hotels, none of them costing more than the price of a tank of fuel for a modern SUV.
The Pyrenees in autumn, driven in a properly chosen car, is one of those routes that ought to be on every serious driver's life list — and which, somehow, almost no one does.
We will return next year.
