GRAND FORMAT – The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) added the moth to its red list on Thursday. In 2021, Le Figaro Magazine had visited the forest palace of these emblematic insects.
From our special correspondents in Mexico – Vincent Jolly (text) and Pascal Maitre (photos)
It is a very strange winter palace that awaits the traveler on the heights of the mountains of Michoacán. Perched where the Sierra Madre and the Mexican neo-volcanic mountain range meet, the building resembles a cathedral open to all. We enter it humbly before the first light of dawn. Its owners are still sleeping. Everything is silent. The air carries scents of resin and damp earth. Huge pillars rise from the sloping ground. Impossible to distinguish the summit. They rise high towards a starry sky which they seem to keep from collapsing.
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These gigantic dark columns are not of smooth marble or stone; they are, like big, wide bouchots, full of asperities. Tortuous stalagmites frozen by the cold on which hang what looks like hundreds of thousands of shells. Mussels? At 3200 meters above sea level and 250 kilometers from the…
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