Exactly thirty years ago, the Farrera Centre of Art and Nature (a village of just over a hundred inhabitants in Pallars Sobirà) was seen as a wild idea. It was founded by the painter Cesca Gelabert and the geographer Lluís Llobet, two neo-ruralists with anti-system ideas who already had a home in Farrera. They were convinced by the Irish activist Bernard Loughlin (1950-2018), who had been director years earlier of the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, the name of a house-refuge for renowned European artists and writers. “You should do the same in Farrera, and only the two of you can build it,” Loughlin insisted to the young Catalan couple.