Montgaillard, on the road to Bagnères-de-Bigorre and the Pic du Midi is the village of the devil and the cookie.
The village has its Pont du Diable (Devil's Bridge).
According to the legend the construction site was never ending and the idea came to make a pact with the devil.
The construction site was going to advance and even finish.
The devil had demanded to become the owner of the soul who would cross the bridge first.
The inhabitants then decided to have a cat cross the bridge.
The devil had only his eyes to cry.
This old bridge has withstood all the floods of the Adour river for centuries, especially the devastating one of 1875 when all the bridges from Bagnères to Maubourguet gave way, except this one.
Montgaillard is also the village of Les Cagots.
Montgaillard and its famous water...
But Montggaillard is also a village where water holds a very important place. There are indeed five laundries in the commune, a record for the department.
In addition to the Adour river, we also note the presence of the Alaric canal and a water source reputed to heal wounds in the woods of Lassègues.
"Here is what one can read in the Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française about this source: In 1917, not far from Bagnères-de-Bigorre (Hautes-Pyrénées), E. Harlé saw seven rags on the bushes near the source of Montgaillard, called "Houn de la sègues"; he remembers then that having come to this place in the past, there had been fifteen or twenty rags, tied around the branches. The superstition in this case was to bring back near the sacred spring, the cloths having been used to moisten the body of the sick person in order to attach the evil to the spring. A woman interviewed deplored the fact that traditions are being lost; until the mobilization of 1914, grateful patients never failed to bring back to the source the rags they had used; today, they forget, the war stops everything. »
In the past, Montgaillard was home to two stations, one for the Tarbes-Bagnères railway and another for a small electric tramway Bagnères-Lourdes.
The Védère Biscuiterie
The other curiosity of Montgaillard is a tea room installed in a wagon and this wagon is inside the Biscuiterie Védère.
Since 1905 Védère has been making excellent cookies distributed throughout France.
To revive the old railway line that linked Tarbes to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Védère has opened an original place for tasting, in a station hall rebuilt for the occasion, a stainless steel SNCF DEV car.
Close by, on the rails, behind the gatekeeper's house, a BB4240 locomotive built in 1934 in Tarbes, a real museum piece since there are only four left in France, also offers itself to your gaze.
Vedere factory
423, route de la Gare,
65200 Montgaillard
Biscuiterie Tel. 05 62 91 50 62
Tel Boutique 05 62 91 63 33
www.biscuiterievedere.com
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator
(free version)
