Savage Frontier traces the routes over the mountains taken by monks, soldiers, poets, pilgrims and refugees, examining the lives and events that have shaped the Pyrenees across the centuries. Its cast of characters includes Napoleon, Hannibal and Charlemagne; the eccentric British climber Lord Henry Russell; Francisco Sabaté Llopart, the Catalan anarchist who waged a lone war across the Pyrenees against Franco for years after the Civil War; and the cellist Pau Casals, who spent more than twenty-three years in exile only a few miles from the Spanish border, to show his disapproval of the regime.

Acclaimed author Matthew Carr uncovers the fascinating story of one of the most dramatic landscapes on Earth—both a forbidding, mountainous frontier zone of stunning beauty and a site of sharp conflict between nations and empires.