Ането: Высочайшая вершина Пиренеев и тающие ледники

The highest mountain in the Pyrenees
Aneto is located in the Posets Maladeta Natural Park, in the municipality of Benasque, Huesca province, autonomous community of Aragon, Spain. It is part of the Maladeta massif and is located in the Benasque valley. It consists of Paleozoic terrain of a granitic nature and Mesozoic materials. Its northern side holds the largest glacier in the Pyrenees, covering in 2005; it is shrinking rapidly due to warming summer temperatures and decreasing winter precipitations over the 20th century – it covered 106.7 ha in 1981, and over 200 ha in the 19th century. It is estimated that it has lost more than half of its surface in the last 100 years, and that it may disappear around 2050.

Initially, the mountain did not even have a name. There are indications that the shepherds and hunters from the southern valleys referred to it as Malheta or Malahita or Punta. It was also previously known as La Malahite. The first traveller who is recorded as having seen it from the port (or pass) of Benasque, Louis Ramond de Carbonnières, simply described its appearance as "needles of ice" in 1787. The highest point of the Pyrenees eventually inherited the name of a village on its south eastern side: Aneto. It took Émile Belloc's renown work on the Pyrenees (notably on its hydrology, glaciology and etymology) to establish the name of Aneto as the official toponym; by 1898, he referred to it only by this name.

Some 2 km away on its north west fringe lies the Maladeta peak that, though not being among the five highest peaks in the environment, gave its name to the entire massif. It subsequently earned the greatest interest of climbers, especially in the early 18th century. Mainly, it was a matter of perspective, since from the natural entrance to the valley or arriving from France, its top is in the foreground, while the crest hides the true extent of its eastern neighbor, taller and with larger glaciers. Only when Friedrich von Parrot reached the top of the Maladeta in 1817, came the realisation that both Aneto as well as its neighbours the Pico del Medio, the Punta de Astorg, the Pico Maldito and la Aguja Schmidt Endell towered higher. Until then, the Monte Perdido had been considered the highest. However, the uncovering of the highest point of the Pyrenees had hardly been accomplished when the mountain began to earn a reputation, as several glacial disasters, some fatal, dissipated the interest in crowning it notably with the death of Luchon Barrau, considered the dean and leading expert in the area. He fell in a crack in the ice on Maladeta. This caused shock among the natives, who already fearful of venturing the glacier, became genuinely scared of the mountain which they considered cursed. The peak lies in the north east of the province of Huesca above the town of Benasque. Aneto occupies the eastern end of the Malditos Massif which primarily consists of a 6 km long ridge, running from north west to south east at over 3000m. The ridge connects Aneto towards the east with the more visible Maladeta peak, further to the west, and includes the Coronas peaks and Pico Maldito, which, together with the crest of the portillons, gives the massif its characteristic image. Although the valley to the north is the source of the Ésera river, which flows west and then south, the northern slopes of Aneto and its glacier drain into a sinkhole called Forau de Aigualluts in the Plan de Aigualluts and flow underground to the east where they resurface to empty into the Aran Valley and the Garonne river, flowing north into France and the Atlantic Ocean. The waters of the western and southern sides, flow into the Coronas and Llosas lakes respectively before draining separately into the river Ballibierna, which flows into the Esera, then the Cinca before joining the Ebro and flowing to the Mediterranean. Thus although Aneto does not lie on the main ridge of the Pyrenees, it does lie on the watershed between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

This agglomeration of summits, all markedly Alpine, is the birthplace of what were once the largest glaciers in the Pyrenees, which stretched up to the mouth of the Congosto Ventamillo with depths of ice several hundred metres thick. Today, global warming has reduced the portentous mass to eleven glaciers that total only three hundred acres. No one knows for sure when the melting process began but despite a slight advance in the '50s it has now accelerated rapidly, and it is expected that the Aneto permafrost and the glaciers of the Pyrenees could disappear around the middle of the 21st century. The Aneto Maladeta massif sustains a total of 286 acres' surface, representing more than half of all the glaciers in Spain all of which being located in the Pyrenees.

The uniqueness of the massif and its appeal has led to the virtual abandonment of farming activities, replaced by tourism. The flora of the environment, therefore, has been impeccably conserved, especially on hillsides and massifs, where the forests remain in their primary state.

This layer, which reaches 3,404 metres above sea level, is the one that presents greatest difficulties for the development of life. The harsh weather conditions that the plants have to endure at the top of the peaks, ridges and crests, require the development of an extraordinary resilience. There are a number of factors to endure such as strong insolation, low temperatures and short growing seasons in the presence of snow most of the year. Totally devoid of woody vegetation, it is colonized by more than 100 plant species, including lichens, mosses, succulents and microscopic algae. Among the flora present are the Androsace Vandelli, which is found at 2,800 metres, and the Silene acaulis. 20% of these species are endemic to the Pyrenees.

An aviation intersection called ANETO exists very close to the mountain itself, exactly on the border of France and Spain. For pilots crossing the Pyrenees this intersection marks the boundary between the Bordeaux and Barcelona airspaces.