VIDEO: Hiker comes face to face with bear in French Pyrenees
The rare encounter was with the oldest brown bear in the mountain range
There are just over 80 adult bears in the Pyrenees, according to the most recent data
Alex Alferez/Shutterstock
A man hiking in the French Pyrenees has come face to face with one of mountains’ most famous residents – a brown bear called Néré.
Renaud Gouezel stumbled across the bear while hiking in the Lis Valley, near Luchon.
“I never thought I would see one in my life,” Renaud Gouezel said in a video he made during the encounter.
In the video, posted on Instagram, the large brown bear is shown just metres away from Mr Gouezel, looking straight at him.
Néré is considered to be the oldest brown bear in France. He was born in 1997 to a Slovenian female, Ziva.
Bears were on the verge of disappearing in the Pyrenees when the French government started a reintroduction programme in the 1990s, bringing over some bears, such as Néré’s mother, from Slovenia.
Bear sightings are rare in the Pyrenees, where 83 brown bears and 16 bear cubs were recorded in 2023, according to the French Biodiversity Agency and its Brown Bear Network. This marked the first rise in bear numbers in the Pyrenees in three decades, and was an increase from 76 adult bears in 2022.
Read more: Brown bear numbers in France rise for first time in 30 years
Brown bears are found across over 7,000km of the mountain range and in five French departments: Pyrénées-Atlantiques, Hautes-Pyrénées, Haute-Garonne, Ariège and Pyrénées-Orientales. They have also been spotted in the Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia regions of Spain and in Andorra.
While activists have celebrated the rising bear numbers, the animals have caused tensions with farmers, some of whom say bears are a threat to their livestock.
Read more: France opens door to bear-scaring measures in the Pyrenees
