The Centre Excursionista de Catalunya (CEC) is turning 150 years old, and starting this November, it will organize a whole series of activities to commemorate its birth and, above all, to celebrate that it remains a living entity well-connected to the country's cultural activity. The presentation of this program of events will be announced next week, but for now, it is already known that the poster is a work by the artist Perejaume, one of the great figures of contemporary Catalan art. The work invites a broad look at the backbone spirit that hiking has traditionally had in Catalonia: the resemblance between the waves of the sea and the shapes of the mountain ranges refers to an integral concept of the territory that unites nature, culture, and identity.

With summer vacations approaching, it's time to decide: what do you fancy more, the sea or the mountains? This question sometimes becomes a question of identity: are you more of a water or dry land person? Whenever someone presents this combination, I think the experience of many Catalans is the middle way: neither sea nor mountain; some of us are forest and pool people. Others, plain and marsh people. In any case, the combination of soaking and shade is usually the goal of anyone who wants to overcome the hot season. Whatever you decide, I recommend a book about dry land and a book that has a certain aftertaste of salt water and that, while we're at it, reminds us of the absurdity of valuing our territory only when we have vacations.

Perejaume's readers (Sant Pol de Mar, 1957) know that, in their poems, aphorisms and essays, literary creation and nature are intertwined, they feed off each other and even merge. To put it in words that can be found in The Written, his latest book, "the text is based on the slope of the land", there is "a humid breeze that always runs letters up" and you can "bind several valleys linked by the valley". "Ah, if only I knew how to write like any mountain writes!" exclaims the author in one of the segments of The open table, the initial section that opens the volume.