The Coll de Banyuls, on the edge of the French department of Pyrenées Orientales, offers a convenient path across the border between France and Spain, an alternative to the major highway crossing, fifteen kilometres to the west as the crow flies — but far longer by road — at La Jonquera.

There is no customs post at the Coll de Banyuls, and there was no covered road here until about ten years ago, but the locals knew about it all too well: historically it played an important role in the frontier traffic, especially during the Spanish Civil War, when tens of thousands of refugees crossed over, to be herded into camps along the beaches at Argèles-sur-mer and Saint-Cyprien. Shortly afterwards, in the years that followed the Civil War, many other refugees crossed, in the opposite direction, fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.  They were assisted at every stage by the local Maquis and guides who risked their lives to take small groups of migrants across the mountains, many of them already exhausted by their flight and terrified of capture. The most famous of these refugees was the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who crossed a short distance to the east of here, at Portbou. In the valley below, a few kilometres inland from Banyuls, stands a memorial to the brave villagers who guided their charges across the mountains.

Shortly after the Coronavirus pandemic broke out, the border was closed to traffic. The French police set up a barricade consisting of four huge boulders, preventing vehicles carrying Covid-infected passengers from one country to the other. Curiously, this narrative changed the following year, and the closure of the road was justified as an attempt to prevent the passage, as a local French newspaper claimed, of ‘illegal immigrants and drug smugglers.’ Why such felons should pass this way, rather than via the main crossing at La Jonquera, where there is no passport control, or by any of the other minor crossings for that matter, remains a mystery. 

In the nearby villages on the Spanish side, fuelled by the autocratic decision of the French police to close the border, the rumour started circulating that ‘terrorists’ had been using the pass, a weird skewing of the truth that managed to convolute two variations on the notion of the ‘other’, blending fear of Coronavirus with fear of the masked bomber. In these paranoid times, however, such confabulations should come as no surprise.  Walking near the pass in the late spring of 2022, I noticed a couple of camouflaged SUV’s, hidden behind a clutch of bushes and quite invisible from the road on the Spanish side. The foremost of the vehicles sported a banner above the windscreen that read ‘FORCE VIGIPIRATE’. A quartet of heavily-armed soldiers stood at their ease, chatting. One of them greeted me with a cheery ‘Bonjour’ as though his presence there were a routine matter, and he and his colleagues were here simply to enjoy the view. I continued on my way, and onto French terrain, along a trail that hugged the flank of the mountain I had just descended.

I was therefore very please to discover, this summer, that local people have commandeered a JCB and removed, or kidnapped the boulder that blocked the middle of the road, and plonked it on the roundabout outside the nearest village on the Spanish side, Espolla, with a sign that reads, in Catalan, ‘The Alberas are not a border’. Thus far there has been no response from the French authorities. The gendarmes — or the Force Vigipirate — are unable to retrieve their boulder as it now resides on the territory of another sovereign state. The boulder has been daubed with the senyera estelada, the flag of Catalan independence, since many Catalans do not recognise the state border between Spain and France as signifying anything more than an artifical divide between Spanish Cataluña and the French Catalogne. No one I have spoken to has pointed out the delicious irony that Independentistas are taking advantage of a national border that they disagree with in order to escape prosecution from police action.

Nevertheless, I applaud their removal of the boulder. That is what we need more of: civic action for the common good. It brings a cheer to the heart that people take matters into their own hands in this way.