In the eighteenth century it took ten days for news from Paris to travel the eight hundred kilometres to Perpignan situated at the far reaches of France. The geography of the region contributed to a sense of remoteness and isolation and had a massive influence on the mindset of the inhabitants of Roussillon. Wildly contrasting eco-systems are packed into a comparatively small geographical area—a Mediterranean plain, lagoons, a rocky coast, arid hills, forests, dramatic river gorges and the high mountains of the Pyrenees. The people had to endure extreme weather. The summer months on the plain were insufferably hot and droughts were frequent. Mountain communities had to battle bitterly cold winters and were cut off from the outside world for months. Flash flooding threatened both highland and plain communities. Making a living in this landscape was hard, but even mountain communities were connected economically and socially by networks of paths and tracks known only to locals. Despite the partition of the province, Catalans north of the frontier retained links with their ethnic counterparts to the south. The smooth running of the economies of borderland communities was reliant on the seasonal movement of people, flocks and herds between highlands and lowlands.