Una vida entre montañas

On Thursday, March 20, 2014, in the Gipuzkoan municipality of Oñate, Juanita Maiztegi died at the age of 94. Weeks before, her sister Icíar had done it. Both were members of the family that owned the large Goiko Venta hotel house in Aránzazu, and both were very important to our family. The origin of this book is found on that gray winter afternoon when we went to her funeral, in images and memories of a free childhood in the mountains and in everything that followed. The author of these lines would never have believed that his first steps in the fields of Urbía and the Sierra de Aitzkorri were going to lead him not only to the nearby valleys of Roncal or Benasque, to Ordesa and Monte Perdido and, from them, to mountains the whole of Spain, but also the French Pyrenees, the Alps, Tyrol, the fascinating Tibetan and Hindu world of Nepal, Bhutan and the Himalayas, Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Rwenzori in Uganda, New Zealand and Greenland, Morocco , to the Vilcanota mountain range (Peru) or to the Rocky Mountains of Canada. After a lifetime traveling the world, and in that Basque land where it all began, he decided to put aside notarial acts and deeds and compose his memoirs, as a humble mountaineering testimony and as a tribute to his great references. This is a personal, sincere and loving story that brings together landscapes and cultures through an unusual experience, and that speaks of the human and the eternal as eloquently as the photographs that the artist himself took with his camera.