French teen, 18, hauls 77-lb walnut cross up Spain's Aneto after the summit cross was cut down; vandals toppled his too
Maël Le Lagadec, a Montauban landscaping apprentice, climbed 3,404 m with a 35 kg cross. Spain's Guardia Civil is still investigating the cut 1951 original.
It was about 15 hours into the climb, with snow, fog and a temperature of 25 degrees Fahrenheit, when Maël Le Lagadec edged across the Mahomet Pass, the narrow ridge just short of the summit of Aneto. He was 18, and he was carrying a cross on his back. The cross was walnut, weighed 35 kilograms (77 pounds) and went up to 3,404 meters (11,168 feet), the highest point in the Pyrenees.
The landscaping apprentice from Montauban, in southern France, made the climb on May 9 to fill the space left by another cross. The iron cross that crowned the peak had been cut with an angle grinder and thrown down the mountainside in April. His own was later toppled, put back by Spanish climbers and eventually replaced by a second one made of spruce. Spain's Guardia Civil has yet to name anyone responsible.
The original was iron, about three meters tall and close to 100 kilograms. The Centre Excursionista de Catalunya put it up in 1951, and it became a landmark for generations of climbers in the Aragonese Pyrenees. It survived windstorms that tore it off in the 1960s and in 1999, and a coat of yellow paint in October 2018.
In September 2023, it was taken down after more than seven decades of exposure had worn it out. The blacksmith Miguel Ángel Plaza restored it, and it returned to Aneto in August 2025 in an operation involving GREIM specialists and the Guardia Civil's air unit. GREIM is the Guardia Civil's mountain rescue group, based in Benasque.
In mid-April, guides and climbers told the Benasque town hall the cross was gone. The town hall passed the alert to GREIM, and early findings pointed to a deliberate act. The Guardia Civil opened an investigation to determine whether it was theft or vandalism.
Eighty pounds on his back
Maël lives in Montauban, is in the fourth year of a work-study program in landscaping and has climbed only since the fall of 2025. He learned of the cut on social media. “Instead of just getting angry like everyone else on social media, I was going to act,” he told Aleteia.
Aleteia reports he grew up in a Catholic family that was not especially practicing. According to El Confidencial Digital, he told the newspaper La Dépêche that although he is baptized, he does not consider himself a believer, but that the cross is part of the landscape and deserves respect. He told Aleteia what a summit cross means: for believers it protects the valley, and for climbers it is also a landmark, because it points to the goal you set for yourself.
Working alone, he built a walnut cross 3.6 feet tall and 2.3 feet wide and varnished it for the high mountains. He left at midnight on May 9 from the Hospital de Benasque parking lot with his friend Julien Benazet Arrieudebat, using the overnight freeze to walk on snow. The friend was a beginner, and Maël would not let him carry the cross. With climbing gear, he was hauling about 110 pounds for roughly 15 hours.
Other climbers stopped to stare along the way. One woman lent him her trekking pole. Another asked, grinning, whether he knew who had done this before him. “No,” Maël answered, spent. “Well, it was Jesus!” He thought then of the Stations of the Cross. John's Gospel says Jesus went out carrying his own cross to the place called the Skull, in Aramaic Golgotha (John 19:17).
At the summit, in fog and minus 4 Celsius, Maël dug 40 centimeters into the snow with his ice axe to hold the cross in place for the time being. He said he would return days later to seal it.
Toppled, restored, gone
Two weeks later, the walnut cross was found knocked down below the summit on May 22, half-buried in snow on the Llosas ridge, according to elDiario.es. On Sunday, May 24, two Spanish climbers took it back up and set it on its base. Aragón Digital reports that other climbers helped carry it.
In late June it vanished again. A friend climbed Aneto and did not see it, and sent videos. “It couldn't be the weather,” Maël told Aleteia. “I understood it was intentional.” This time he did not go public right away. “If someone is that stubborn, I'm going to be stubborn too.”
Not everyone welcomed the climb. A secularist group, the Movimiento Hacia un Estado Laico (MHUEL), asked the Seprona, the Guardia Civil's environmental unit, and Aragon's government to look into the installation and, if warranted, open sanction proceedings against the young man, elDiario.es reported. The group argues that the Posets-Maladeta Natural Park is protected land and that a cross presumes a belief not every visitor shares. Benasque's mayor, Manuel Mora, took a kinder view. He told the radio network COPE that the wooden cross would not replace the original and would stay only on a temporary basis.
A spruce cross and 24 miles of trail
In July, Maël rebuilt the cross in spruce. It weighs about 15 kilograms (33 pounds), is varnished and carries flat iron straps he bent himself, along with a small mountain drawn above the word “Aneto.” He picked the hardest route. The climb began at the Hospice de France, on the French side, and covered 39 kilometers, about 24 miles, with roughly 4,000 meters of elevation gain, alongside a friend, Nathan.
“They thought I was joking when I said I would climb back up as many times as it took to reinstall it,” he wrote on social media afterward. On the trail, a climber filming the pair remarked, according to Aragón Digital, that it showed there is still hope in the world.
What the Guardia Civil found, and what is missing
The iron cross turned up by chance. It was spotted on Tuesday, June 16, at 4:15 p.m., during a Guardia Civil rescue operation in the area. Agents flying over saw an object half-buried in snow at the foot of a wall about 200 meters below the summit. The thaw had uncovered it. It was lifted out by helicopter and taken to Benasque, where it sits in police custody. When the investigation ends, it will go to the town hall, which will decide whether to put it back in its original spot.
As of mid-October, no one had been identified. The Guardia Civil recovered the cross, but those who sawed it off and threw it down the slope have not been identified. Benasque wants to return the cross to the summit before the first heavy snows, according to Lugares de Aventura, which reports no firm date for the operation. The mayor has also said he plans to seek cultural-heritage status for the symbols on the summit. On Maël's cross, he was blunt, El Debate reported: when the original goes back up, the Frenchman's will come down.
Maël has already said what he will do if the spruce cross is not respected. “I hope this cross is respected,” he wrote on Instagram. “Otherwise, I will have to continue the expeditions on Aneto.”
