The Tour de France bicycle race often includes a race up to the summit. This is where Eddy Merckx rode himself to the brink of collapse while winning the stage in 1970. He received oxygen, recovered, and won the Tour.
The mountain is not part of the Alps nor of the Pyrenees.
The top of the mountain is bare of trees, sometimes attributed to logging for shipbuilding some centuries ago.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump