The Gavarnie thrust sheet of the southern Pyrenees is bound to the east and west by ~40-km-long transverse zones producing a rectilinear thrust sheet. Within the Bolta¿a region the northwest corner of the Gavarnie thrust sheet is well exposed. The locale is used to characterize the strain and kinematic patterns and detailed geometry of an oblique ramp over a variety of scales. The hanging wall of the Gavarnie thrust fault in the area was transported toward ~200¿ and contains two regional-scale, north-south trending anticlines. In the vicinity of the oblique ramp the strike of the Gavarnie thrust fault and the trend of hanging wall fold axes are ~0¿--180¿. The magnitude of shortening accommodated by regional-scale fold and fault development is constant at ~25% along the length of the ramp. The orientation of instantaneous and finite shortening axes on meso and grain scales was inferred from the attitudes of cleavage, mesoscale folds and faults, carbonate mechanical twins, and the geometry of finite strain. Finite and instantaneous shortening axes are subhorizontal and remain perpendicular to the Gavarnie thrust ramp within a ~10-km-wide zone in the footwall and a ~20-km-wide zone in the hanging wall. Outside of the halo of footwall and hanging wall ramp deformation, the principal shortening directions consistently trend ~200¿, parallel to thrust transport directions throughout the south Pyrenean thrust belt. The parallelism of instantaneous and finite principal strain axes suggests that grain-scale deformation was nonrotational. Total shortening measured within the footwall of the Gavarnie thrust fault decreases from ~60% adjacent to the thrust ramp to <10% approximately 10 km away from the ramp. While principal shortening directions determined over scales ranging from millimeters to kilometers show a consistent pattern in the Bolta¿a region, they differ by as much as 90¿ from tectonic convergence directions between Iberia and Eurasia during the Alpine orogeny (~80-18 Ma) determined from magnetic anomaly patterns in the central Atlantic and Bay of Biscay. Divergence between plate convergence directions and Alpine south Pyrenean shortening directions suggests that ~200 km of NW-SE convergence was apparently partitioned into the north and south Pyrenean thrust zones which were shortened ~167 km, the Iberian Range which accomodated ~30 km of shortening, <10 km of shortening accomodated in the Catalan Coastal Range, and ~100 km of right-lateral strike slip accomodated within the internides. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1995