A spot of history

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A spot of history

Far la routo is Occitan for “make the journey” or transhume.
The areas crossed by the La Routo trail were long connected by the great sheep transhumance routes from the plains of Lower Provence (Crau and Camargue) to Piedmont’s Occitan valleys.
The migrating flocks left their mark on them.

Genesis

Practices to do with the “great sheep transhumance”, which came to an end in the 1950s, still have a major impact on the identity of regional landscapes.
They provided the basis for an ethnographic survey, a travelling exhibition and a publication (entitled “La Routo”), by the Ecomuseum of Pastoralism, the Institute of Comparative and Mediterranean Ethnology (Aix-en-Provence) and the Maison de la Transhumance, presented over the last dozen or so years in some thirty venues from Provence to the Alps.
La Routo draws on this historical basis in order to enable discovery of pastoralism’s territories, professions and products and their history, through travelling the transhumance routes on foot.

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