"What happens to you when you are young, you end up loving when you are very old."

BarcelonaThe pools of the Merlès stream are currently overcrowded, and even access has been restricted. "Now you can only park in certain places, and people have to walk a long way to get there. It's the only way to preserve these spaces," laments Imma Puigcorbé, one of the prominent faces of Revolta Pagesa. This is the setting of her fondest summer memories, but it's no longer what it used to be: "Now it's hard for me to go because I know what I'll find. Before, these spaces were largely owned by the people who lived there, and with social media, they've lost their charm."

In the photo she shares with ARA, she's 8 years old, at the center of a group of boys and girls of all ages who made up the Les Llosses (Ripollès) summer school group, which was held at the village hall, an isolated farmhouse surrounded by mountains. She went every year during July and August: in the morning they did summer notebooks and at noon they went out to do outdoor activities. Her favorite was the water outing in the stream. "When we were little, it was full of crabs, blackheads, and sandpipers. It was a pristine stream and we were alone, just with a few bathers who were neighbors," she notes. The dynamic was totally different from her reality during the school year at a fairly strict private school with lectures.

Sometimes, the older ones went on excursions secretly from the teachers, and one day, they found a cow skeleton half-buried in a dry stream. "We couldn't think of anything else to do but go to the town hall to get the shovels they had, some aluminum shovels that were meant for removing snow. Well, we absolutely destroyed them," she exclaims. An anecdote that ended with her being punished by having to collect all the stones from the town hall garden: "I'll always remember."

Puigcorbé greatly enjoyed these forays into nature. "We had such a good time going to look for cow skeletons. I remember there was a sandy area where lizards laid eggs. We put them in jars and the little lizards would hatch. It was quite the wild adventure," she recounts enthusiastically. As a farmer and veterinarian, she was already showing promise. "Living a childhood in contact with nature makes people end up loving it. What happens to you as a child, you end up loving as a grown-up. In the first years of our lives, what we do and don't do marks us forever. This doing alongside trees, animals, ponds, ponds, tells me four months with his arm," they have forged their identity. The little one is already immersed in this rural world, in Begudà (Garrotxa), where they live in a farmhouse. "I think it's vital to be a functional adult to know where your roots come from, where what you eat comes from, the whys and wherefores of things, to know how fragile nature is... This is very important to learn; it's the foundation of everything before using a cell phone, a computer, or a Nintendo."