Tour Climbs: The complete guide to every mountain stage on the Tour de France. Chris Sidwells

      Not too long, not too high and not too steep. The Aspin is a great place to start mountain climbing in the Pyrenees. It’s no push over and it has a great Tour de France history, but the Aspin is fairly unique in the Pyrenees in that it climbs the mountain on well-engineered roads with plenty of hairpins to break the ascent down into manageable bits.

      There’s a little taste of true Pyrenean character just after halfway, where the bends stop and the road is thrown straight at the climb’s steepest part. It is ten percent gradient here, steep and exposed if there is any wind, but this stretch doesn’t last for long before another sweeping hairpin takes you up to the gently rounded summit.

      The town of Arreau, which is a key settlement in the Aure valley with a castle and a museum of local life, nestles at the foot of the Aspin. It’s squeezed into a thin ribbon by the mountains that surround it, and its houses are tall and grey, and capped with steeply pitched roofs, an indication of the rain they get in this region.

      The rain makes this area good for farming. Not for crops but cattle, which graze freely on the slopes of the Aspin. On the descent there is a herd of big cream-coloured animals, which also tend to graze fairly freely on the road. They don’t look or care what’s coming down the mountain, so be careful when you see them. They will walk out in front of you.

      The descent isn’t steep, so once you’ve survived the wandering cattle take time to look for the quarries, from which the green marble was extracted to build the Palace of Versailles, the Opera in Paris and many other monuments all across France. Once at the bottom your are at the foot of the Col du Tourmalet.

       WHICH WAY?

      Arreau is on the D929 with the towns of Lannemezan to the north and San Lary-Soulan to the south. From the north turn right, and south left, onto the D918 to begin the Aspin.