Chaos de Targasonne

Between Font-Romeu and Dorres, on the south-facing slope overlooking the Cerdagne plain, thousands of rounded granite blocks are heaped into small mounds at an altitude of around 1,500 metres. This is the Chaos de Targasonne, which takes its name from the neighbouring village but extends mostly across the commune of Angoustrine-Villeneuve-des-Escaldes. There are more than a thousand boulders here, most of them two to five metres in diameter.

These blocks are made of a granite rich in feldspar, quartz and black mica, from a vast massif that was emplaced in the heart of the Hercynian chain. Granite chaos formations come from the slow weathering of the rock along its fractures, followed by erosion, which clears away the granitic sand and exposes the hardest boulders, rounded by time; in Cerdagne, the cold of the glacial periods probably accentuated this process.

The piling up of the blocks formed rock shelters, used since Prehistory. Later, the stonecutters of Dorres and Angoustrine came to quarry and cut the granite on the spot. The site is now recognised as a natural area of ecological interest.

Since the 1970s, climbers have made the chaos one of the foremost French bouldering venues, often compared to Fontainebleau. Just behind it stands the tower of the Thémis solar power plant, inaugurated in 1983: Cerdagne is one of the sunniest regions of France.