Lyona: "It was paradisiacal, we were far from the village, in the middle of the mountain, without a telephone line or television"

The illustrator and filmmaker Lyona (Marta Puig) spent all the August months of the eighties and nineties in La Sénia, in Montsià, her favorite place in Catalonia. About five years ago, the whole family reunited at this house belonging to her aunt and uncle in Benicarló, which had been the meeting point for the sisters of the family with their partners and children: "There were fourteen of us cousins of similar ages, with a ten-year difference between the oldest and the youngest. I have very good memories of it, it was heavenly, we were far from the town, in the middle of the mountains, without a phone line or television. Back then there were no mobile phones or internet, you were completely cut off".

They had no distractions, they had to invent whatever they could: they went camping, the older ones told them scary stories, they had breakfast and then went outside, and didn't come back until lunchtime, they were only home for meals and to sleep. The bedrooms were a dream, they were full of bunk beds where all the cousins slept. The house had a lot of land, they played around it, in the woods and in the mountains, they spent a lot of hours by the river, and walked along the road until they reached the Ulldecona reservoir, which was relatively close: "When there was water, we jumped off the bridge. In years when it was drier, you discovered the sunken ghost town. When it was exposed, you could see the church and the little houses, it was impressive". Sometimes they also brought a boat, but she didn't dare to jump into the reservoir, it seemed too immense to her. Where she did dare to jump was into the river from the rock near the Fonda de Sant Pere, “a rock and a waterfall that seemed giants to me and that over the years I have realized are tiny”.  All these adventures they lived without the supervision of any adult, although there was always an older cousin, who was in charge. Many afternoons of ping-pong, playing volleyball and with a minikart on the go-kart circuit that his architect uncle had designed. He admits that they had done crazy things, such as creating a zip line to go down the mountain with a rope and a chair: “The invention didn’t go well and it wasn’t repeated, the first one who tried it went down the whole mountain on his back,” he says, laughing. He has punctual memories: the clarity with which the stars were seen in the sky, the eclipse of one of those summers, or the wild goats. "There were goats around the house and some days you would wake up and find one looking at you!" She always looked forward to summer to go to La Sénia to meet her family and have adventures. Incredible summers that Lyona lived there until she was sixteen, and which during her adolescence she also shared with friends she had invited to spend a few days in her paradise.