Le sable rose de montagne

Overview

Long ago, there were no roads to the chalets in the high mountain pastures. All the material for a new chalet had to be carried up by man or mule, so the peasants who built and cared for these chalets used the nearest rocks available and found a way to extract the sand needed for cement right on the spot. They used to burn clods of earth for three days until all vegetable residue was burned away and only the minerals remained as pink sand. This custom slowly disappeared at the beginning of the 21st century. However, 83-year-old Henri Chillez remembers seeing his father doing this when he was ten. Thanks to him, we were able, in 1987, to reconstruct the operation and film each step needed to change earth into pink sand.